Favorite Music of 2020

These list preambles get harder to write each year, and as the world gets increasingly complicated, I find myself struggling more and more to say anything about it. What on earth am I even supposed to say about 2020 that hasn't been said ad nauseum? At any rate, a silver lining is that we had great music to listen to while the pandemic raged (continues to rage).

I still don't listen to enough metal or hip-hop, and instead, I listened to a larger proportion of jazz and electronic music than in probably any year prior. Plus, I still have probably a hundred albums I want to listen to more but haven't done so enough to justify putting them on this list. Let me know what your favorite music was this year, too, because that's always fun!

Anyway, here's the list.

Favorite Albums:

1. Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters
This seems like a pretty consensus pick, to be honest, at least among music critics, so I'm not going to pretend like I have anything new to say about Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Such chaotic yet elegant music. It's the album I've returned to most this year, and it still gives me chills at times.

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2. NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM: Éons
Not much has changed since I wrote my review. Still definitely my thing: a 2-hour noise-jazz epic. Wonderful.

[Read original review]

3. Kelly Lee Owens: Inner Song
Boss beats and terrific tunes. The best fusion of electronic music and pop music I've heard in a while.

[Read original review]

4. Nate Wooley: Seven Storey Mountain VI
This is a late-year find for me: a single, 45-minute track that builds from a choral chant into an extended improvisation and then back into the chant. It's utterly transfixing and beautiful, indebted to minimalism and jazz but also unclassifiable in its own right. Building from Peggy Seeger's song "Reclaim the Night," the chant itself offers a meditation on gendered violence, and the music connects this idea to something much more cosmic as it dissociates from melody into soaring dissonance. I've not listened to much of the other entries in Wooley's Seven Storey Mountain project (as the title indicates, this is the sixth one), but they all apparently follow variations on this format. I guess I should listen to more, because this is great.

5. Taylor Swift: folklore
I still need to listen to evermore more, but I've listened to this one a lot. It's very good (of course)—Taylor's most songwriterly album since Red and proof, if we needed it, that she hasn't lost those chops since her pivot into full-on radio pop. A lot of albums this year have been billed as "quarantine records," but this is the only one I've heard that makes me feel happy.

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6. Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids: Shaman!
Throwback spiritual jazz-fusion. Moving and personal and enormous-sounding. A lot of the albums on this list are improvisatory and elaborate, but I haven't heard one all year that does a better job of connecting those instrumental flourishes with small personal resonances.

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7. Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
Bob Dylan's been playing the part of old man for longer than he's actually been an old man (he wasn't even 60 when he released the record that inaugurated his "I've seen things, and now I'm on death's door" phase, 1997's Time Out of Mind). But Rough and Rowdy Ways finds him as an actual old man (he's nearly 80), and he's eulogizing like never before: eulogizing himself, his career, and even the 20th century itself.

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8. Lyra Pramuk: Fountain
The liner notes call this "future folk music," which seems about right. For most folk music, the human voice is a foundational instrument, and Fountain is a record consisting entirely of samples of Pramuk's voice. A lot of people consider electronic music to be cold and robotic, but this very concept collapses the distinction between electronic and organic music, if there ever was one. It's hypnotic, warm, peaceful, and beautiful.

9. Grimes: Miss Anthropocene
This one's grown on me a lot since I first reviewed it, and it contains some of Grimes's best songs to date, especially "Delete Forever."

[Read original review]

10. Frédéric D. Oberland & Irena Z. Tomažin: ARBA, DÂK ARBA
This random Bandcamp find hasn't lost an ounce of its power for me. Modern classical drone, that's where it's at.

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Great 2020 Songs Not On These Albums:

Ariana Grande: "positions"—I didn't have a chance to listen to Ariana's new album much, but I do love this song, a slinky, slick piece of pop R&B, smoother than I'm used to hearing from Grande but all the better for it.

Bruce Springsteen: "If I Was the Priest"—Bruce Springsteen got the E Street Band back together and recorded some songs the old-fashioned way, live in the studio, for his new album, Letter to You. To inaugurate the event, the band recorded some songs that Springsteen wrote in the '70s but never put to tape, and those songs are definitely the highlight of the album. "If I Was the Priest" is the best of that bunch, hailing from the Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. days; like most of that album, it's a fire-hose of words and metaphors and melodies, intoxicated on the possibilities of rock music and trying to cram all of those possibilities into one song. I've liked a good deal of Springsteen's output in the 21st century, but boy is it nice to hear him in his classic mode like this.

Cardi B: "WAP" (feat. Megan Thee Stallion)—I mean, what else is there to say? Slaps. Most clever rauch-rap lyrics since CupcakKe retired (ed. to say: she's apparently un-retired now?). Share your favorite lines in the comments. Mine is the one about the "dangly thing in the back of my throat."

Cracka Khan: "Cardi B - WAP (feat. Megan Thee Stallion) But It's Dire, Dire Docks"—Exactly what it says. Best "WAP" remix in a year full of them.

Fleet Foxes: "Sunblind"—Fleet Foxes at their most lovely and effervescent.

Frances Quinlan: "Your Reply"—Really catchy mid-2000s-throwback indie rock song by Hop Along's Frances Quinlan. I've kind of fell out of love with a lot of mid-2000s indie rock, but this makes me feel like I haven't.

HAIM: "The Steps"—Major Shania Twain vibes on this song. Between this and their work on Taylor Swift's evermore, I think I'm ready for HAIM to go '90s pop country.

Illuminati Hotties: "Lucky"—A cover of (easily!) Britney Spears's best song by the plucky, self-proclaimed "tenderpunk pioneer" Illuminati Hotties. I like Illuminati Hotties just okay, but I wish I loved them, because this is great.

Jeff Rosenstock: "Scram!"—"I've been told for most my life / 'Try to see the other side' / By people who have never tried to / See the other side," this song goes, a perfect lyric for the year of the disingenuous centrism of Joe Biden's Democratic party. Rosenstock's shout-along punk has never been more cathartic.

Lianne La Havas: "Weird Fishes"—2020 was apparently the year for Radiohead covers (I can't count how many of those "artist in the bedroom" livestreams included Radiohead songs), and between this and the song on Kelly Lee Owens's Inner Song, 2020 was apparently the year for covering this specific Radiohead song. La Havas's version is a slow-burn soul take on the record, which is the perfect mode for In Rainbows covers, I think.

Megan Thee Stallion: "Shots Fired"—I don't know what actually went down between Megan Thee Stallion and Tory Lanez, but I know whose music makes a better case for their version of the story. Lanez never had a chance. The best diss track all year, which is saying something in a year that also included Noname's J.-Cole-withering "Song 33."

Neil Cicierega: "Fredhammer"/"Limp Wicket"—Mouth Dreams was a little disappointing for me, but this mini-suite in the middle of the album was among my favorite minutes on any album this year. Cicierega mixes Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" with Limp Bizkit's "Nookie" and (eventually) a Star Wars Ewok rap, and it improves on all of them.

Sufjan Stevens: "The Ascension"—Hands-down the best song on the new Sufjan album, as pained and beautiful an exploration of faith as he's ever written. Sufjan is another of my favorite artists who underwhelmed at the album length in 2020, but this song can stand up to anything he's ever done.

U.S. Girls: "4 American Dollars"—Extremely catchy economic-downturn disco.

Yves Tumor: "Kerosene!"—Yves Tumor has grander ambitions than to just be a rock star, but this song is truly a rock star turn: a wailing, bleak anthem of twisted love, anchored by a wicked guitar solo. 2020's "Gimme Shelter."

Mini Reviews for September 14-20, 2020

Sitting here in a sweatshirt because fall weather has begun to show its face, by the grace of God.

Movies

Beanpole (Дылда) (2019)
A transcendently difficult watch. I nearly quit the movie when the infant was smothered to death within fifteen minutes of the movie's opening, and while that's far-and-away the most hard-to-watch part of the film, it accurately sets the tone for what kind of movie this is: a movie about the full horror of the psychological fallout of the Soviet Union's having survived WWII. It's a movie full of pain and despair and exceptionally long pauses in dialogue, oftentimes while that pain and despair are occurring, and I somewhat hated it for a while. But by the end, I had circled around to a kind of bruised fascination, not just at the colors and cinematography (which are sumptuous, especially for a movie as otherwise dour as this) but also at its emotional sweep. I certainly don't blame anyone who finds this indulgently miserable, but there are precious few films that look at the way that the trauma of war (even "just" wars like WWII) persist long after peace is declared. Watching its two central couple flail and claw their way toward an acrid, toxic domesticity within a Stalingrad still licking its wounds from Nazi occupation is, by the end, something I found sickeningly resonant by the end of the film. I dunno, I'll probably never watch this again, but it is something. Grade: B

Lovesong (2016)
Meat-and-potatoes indie filmmaking. There are a lot of ellipses and things left unsaid, which feels perfect for its focus on a friendship crumbling as its two principal characters inhabit increasingly irreconcilably different places in life. This movie nails the way that these late-stage friendships can swing unpredictably from familiar intimacy to callous indifferent and disconnection—with the added dimension that these two friends are very clearly in love with one another, not the men they are with. Riley Keough and Jena Malone are terrific as the leads, to say nothing of the pair of sisters who play Keough's daughter, one when she's 3 and one after the three year time jump in the middle of the movie, when she's 6—great use of child acting here. Grade: B

 

Mur Murs (1981)
A lovely little film essay about the process of making art and that art's role in the artist staking a claim in a community, as well as a great document of L.A.'s mural movement just before it was gentrified. The movie luxuriates in two of my favorite things: gigantic visual art and a vibrant cross-section of human life in the form of a community. Kind of feels like Slacker, only if everyone in that movie were painting big murals. Grade: B+

Documenteur (1981)
The most interesting part of this movie to me is the way that it folds into Mur Murs—reusing some of its footage and also giving a fictional context for that other film (e.g. the protagonist auditions to be the narrator of Mur Murs). Varda also gives us some killer shots here, like the two sex scenes (just pelvises grinding together, abstracted by how close the camera is) and the scene were part of the protagonist's face disappears in the crook of two tilted mirrors. But otherwise, I had a hard time connecting to this movie. I have a cool respect for the way it remixes Varda's own life into itself, but I never really felt the emotional urgency that Varda herself probably feels about the same subject matter. Grade: B-

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)
An unnerving little chiller reminiscent of The Beguiled in the sense that it turns the screws on predatory power dynamics (often sexual though not exclusively) until they explode into a kind of queasy yet liberating violence. Terrific central performances from Jodi Foster and Martin Sheen, though I imagine Sheen had to take a long, hot shower after each day on set playing a vile scumbag like that. Grade: B

 

 

 

The Fall of the House of Usher (La Chute de la maison Usher) (1928)
Extremely cool, semi-avant-garde treatment of Poe's story. Special kudos to Roland de Candé's very, very, very excellent score for the film on the 2001 DVD release that I watched—some Cluster-esque experimental grooves here. Grade: A-

 

 

 

 

Music 

Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids - Shaman! (2020)
Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids' last album, An Angel Fell, was about the intersection of 21st-century politics and history, a voyage that, stream-of-consciousness style, wove the ancient past into things like the death of Michael Brown. This new album, Shaman!, is doing something similar, only this time replacing the explicit politics with much more personal conduits for which history flows. Instead of national iconography like Michael Brown, we get a eulogy for free-jazz legend Cecil Taylor, who was Ackamoor's mentor; we get love songs blown up to cosmic dimensions by Ackamoor's vast arrangements. It's very cool and moving, the way that music and history and interiority all overlap in this yearning transcendence, and I like it a lot better than An Angel Fell, actually. A primo slice of spiritual jazz. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for August 20 - 26, 2018

For some reason, I went on a "sprawling, imperfect visionary films" kick this week, with mixed results.

Movies

Blockers (2018)

I'm far too late to the game to feign surprise that Blockers is so good, but I am at least pleased that it lived up to the somewhat backhanded hype of "it's better than its trailer!" To continue the backhanded mood, I will say that the movie is never better than in its first hour, and while I'm exceedingly grateful that this is the rare modern American comedy somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 minutes, I do think that there isn't really enough movie to make the last act—a largely sentimental pileup of thin character moments—work nearly as well as I wished. Maybe it isn't the spry runtime so much as the fact that the movie barely characterizes its teen characters, who are largely frictionless players in an eyebrow-raisingly idealized night of binge drinking and 'shroom-eating; outside of a gross and somewhat unnecessary vomiting incident (followed by one of the most impressive alcohol-poisoning recoveries I've ever seen), there is not a lot that actually goes wrong on the teen end of things in this movie. Contrast this with Superbad (sorry to bring up such a dude-centric movie in comparison to such a female-centric film, it's just what came to mind first), where the escalating problems of the virginity-losing night help define each character pristinely—there just isn't enough for our Blocker teens to do for me to feel like I know them outside of some very broad personality traits, and while I realize the problem-free teen plot is part of the point (hey, I guess it's not so disastrous to give teens a tad bit of freedom—at least, upper-middle-class, uncannily responsible and savvy teens), it also doesn't do the mechanics of the film any favors. But lordy, I'm being so negative about a movie that is really quite good, so lemme talk about the parents in this movie, who are pretty much perfection and, unlike their kids, actually encounter a whole movie of problems (and a bunch of ass beer, a phrase that made me giggle far more than it should have). The Cena-Mann-Barinholtz trio has one of the best comic dynamics I've seen in an ensemble American comedy in a long, long time, and the script plays precisely to these actors' strengths in relation to one another. Unsurprisingly, John Cena is a fantastic physical comedian, and everyone already knows Leslie Mann is amazing, but I was actually really caught off guard how much I liked Ike Barinholtz's street-wise buffoon; there's an impressive amount of pathos in that performance, and while the movie has no shortage of great lines and deliveries, Barinholtz undoubtedly does the best in timing the comedic cadence of his dialogue. Anyway, the movie's very funny and at least half its cast is well-served, and I wish it were possible to mash this movie with Game Night, 2018's other strong American comedy, so I could make a super movie that was visually stylish in addition to being as comedically sharp as Blockers is. I dunno if that would solve either of the movies' third-act problems, though. Grade: B+

Byzantium (2012)

Byzantium isn't anything particularly new for vampire movies, but there's a floridness to the film that I really connected with, the feeling that immortality sprawls out before these characters in the same tortured, languorous way that the characters' speech spools from their mouths. This feels like what Angel and Buffy were always going for when they did the flashback episodes that showed us Angel and Spike running around in the 1800s and stuff, only it works much, much better here, likely because of the budget and the fact that Neil Jordan is twice the director—on a sheer spectacle scale—that anyone on those shows ever was. The overall story doesn't quite ever find its feet, but the feel of the movie is rich. It's bleak but sumptuous, and Saoirse Ronan is magnificent. Grade: B+

The Road (2009)

As a movie, it's fine, I guess—a little gray, which is the point, probably, and a lot grim, which is another point. But as an adaptation, it's a good case study in why exactly it can be a bad idea to be so slavishly faithful to a source material. First of all, it accentuates any minor deviation from the book (there are a few here, and they land like bombs); second of all, it highlights all the ways in which some specific stories are better suited to one medium than another: e.g. this dystopia, which, despite being more or less accurately transcribed into film, feels far more at home in McCarthy's lean, world-weary prose than in director John Hillcoat's sooty camera. It's honestly kind of boring onscreen. Grade: C+

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

In a sort of meta twist on the Punk'd / Jackass cultural landscape of the mid-2000s that clearly birthed this project, Borat isn't just about pranking the dumb schmucks onscreen that Sacha Baron Cohen encounters in-character on the streets of America; it's about baiting us, the audience members, into laughing at (or worse, not even questioning) Cohen's willfully reductive, inaccurate take on central Asia and thereby proving our own bigotry toward that region—xenophobia weaponized against xenophobia, Kazakhstan First to bring out all the America Firsties. It's a completely ballsy (uh, literally) gambit, and given the litany of my high school peers who, in 2006, incessantly guffawed and quoted "Very nice" and "Great success" in terrible accents, the bait was tremendously (horrifyingly) effective. It's all very punk rock and transgressive, and I think I'm seeing in this what a lot of my other cinephile peers are seeing in Jackass. That said, it's still a bit conceptual for my tastes, high-wire and impressive though the concept may be, and given that absolutely nobody I ever heard quoting the xenophobic shtick seemed to be in on the joke, it's just sort of depressing that all this meticulous work exposing American prejudice went into what ultimately became a decontextualized meme. Grade: B

Gangs of New York (2002)

Gangs of New York is a masterpiece of set design, and it captures with great detail something I'm always immensely interested in, which is the emergence of 20th-century American institutions and conventions out of the relative anarchy of the country's first century (see also: Deadwood). This doesn't prevent the film's nearly three hours from being a slog at times, though, nor does it make Cameron Diaz's or Leonardo DiCaprio's characters any more interesting. I keep seeing people praise Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, which is fine, I guess, but also, it mostly just made me want to watch There Will Be Blood. Basically, this is what happens when Scorsese doesn't have a good screenplay. Grade: B-

Dune (1984)

David Lynch attempts the impossible and tries to adapt Frank Herbert's notoriously unadaptable Dune. Of course he fails—it's a famous failure that anyone could (and should) have seen coming a mile away. The funny thing is, Dune is full of stuff I usually love in Lynch movies: transcendental mysticism, alternating body-horror and Freudian imagery, Kyle MacLachlan, opaque plotting involving otherworldly forces, goofy affection for old Hollywood norms (it feels very much like some mash-up between The Ten Commandments and Cleopatra, but in space), acting at a bizarre register, an acting cameo from ol' David Lynch himself. But somehow, when presented in a Dune context, this is all crushingly boring. When your score involves both Toto and Brian Eno but somehow ends up sounding generic anyway, that's the canary in the coal mine, my friends. Grade: C-

Television

Trial & Error, Season 2 (2018)

I'm hoping this (now cancelled) show gets picked up by Netflix or Hulu or someone à la Brooklyn Nine-Nine, because it's so good. Taking the lightly surreal elements of Season 1 and cranking them up significantly, Season 2 of Trial & Error is every bit the superior set of episodes, mining the increasingly strange small-town setting (something like Pawnee mixed with Monty Python) for some singular pieces of TV comedy. Some of it is fleeting—e.g. how each episode Anne is revealed to have a new psychological condition (my favorite: she has a condition that makes her eyes stay closed for long periods of time, so she has someone paint eyeballs on her eyelids, to hilarious and nightmarish effect); but other bits are recurring, and they accumulate in an impressive commitment to worldbuilding and continuity—like, for example, the Reed/Pecker feud that influences everything from the social dynamics of the town right down to the slang the characters use. And in the midst of this, the show somehow makes room for an engaging murder mystery and well-rounded characters who are likable and even sweet without ever really losing their essential comedic kernal. This is one of the better network sitcoms we've gotten in a while; come on, NBC, why would you give this up? Grade: A-

Books

Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna (2018)

Like a lot of biographies/memoirs of celebrities who have gotten this level of success and artistic freedom (Bruce Springsteen's autobio also comes to mind), Room to Dream is at its most engaging when it's dealing with David Lynch's childhood and early career, where he feels much more within the chaos of bohemian life (there's an amusing/terrifying anecdote recounted in the book involving a young Lynch fending off burglars in his inner-city Philadelphia home with a sword) than later in his career, when he has a team of assistants who cook lunch for him and stuff. This is compounded by the format of the book itself, which is split between traditional biographical writing by Lynch's long-time friend Kristine McKenna and more memoir-ish recollections told in first person by Lynch himself; Lynch's recollections are far more interesting and poetic when he's dealing with events far in the past, which both raises the question of how much these events have been warped by the tricks of memory over decades but also illustrates with great detail exactly the kind of off-kilter mythologizing that Lynch's mind makes of the world around him. So not only does Lynch's life become more straightforward and comfortable as he gets older; his narration seems less steeped in Lynch's own sensibilities. That's not to say that the whole book isn't interesting, though, and fans of his films and other projects (i.e. yours truly) will find a lot of anecdotes and information to tickle their brains. I also wonder, though, what this book would be like if it weren't quite so cozy with Lynch himself; that McKenna has known the man for so long is surely a boon to the book in many ways, but also, it's a very genial biography, despite some bits that seem like they should be a bit more probing (especially when the book talks of his relationships with women, which is routinely depicted as somewhat messy but also quirkily, endearingly so—apparently his ex-wives have all made peace with Lynch's penchant for serial infidelity and work-before-family habits, but even so, I wonder what someone who wasn't Lynch's friend might have made of this). But I'm being unduly negative; David Lynch is an exceedingly interesting person even when he's older and more comfortable, and the behind-the-scenes information about his work is fascinating. Even if it isn't a great read, it's still a very good one, and one I'd recommend to Lynch fans. Grade: B+

Music

Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids - An Angel Fell (2018)

A jazz and worldbeat fusion that's sort of a concept album in the vein of some of the spiritual jazz luminaries of the 1970s. I wish the album swung a bit more for the fences, musically—there are some touches of free jazz, but nothing nearly so ambitious as John Coltrane's Ascension, which makes the spiritual dimensions of An Angel Fell feel comparatively flat. This is an album that could do with a bit more transcendence. Maybe it isn't fair for me to connect this to some of the most notable spiritual jazz of all time, so I'll just say this: there are very good passages here (I love the incorporation of violin and classical guitar in the opening track, for example) as well as some places that feel kind of thin (the chant-like "Land of Ra" is a centerpiece, but not a particularly compelling one). Still, if '70s spiritual jazz is your thing, or jazz that's reaching for something a bit bigger and more mystical than your typical jazz record, you might want to check this out. Grade: B