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 May 15 - 21, 2017

Just survived the last full week of school. Commence celebration!

Movies

Alien: Covenant (2017)
Ask a dozen people what was wrong with the 2012 Alien prequel, Prometheus, and you'll get a dozen different answers. Based on the online reaction thus far, the same seems to be be true of Prometheus's sequel, Alien: Covenant. And make no mistake: this is not a perfect movie. The plotting is haphazard, lurching awkwardly from cheap-thrills horror (there is a shower scene that is already, and justifiably, becoming infamous) to cosmic philosophizing, and the screenplay underwrites several key characters, most significantly Katherine Waterston's. But whereas I thought Prometheus failed by leaving its most intriguing philosophical ideas on the table to grow cold and mangled by a dysfunctional screenplay and a reckless abandon for grotesque action, Covenant actually manages to pick up those ideas and run with them in absolutely fascinating ways. The xenomorph action is interesting enough (and appropriately disgusting), but where this movie really shines is in its Big Ideas: the ideas of creation as sadism, of biogenesis, of the relationship between creator and creation—ideas gestured toward in Prometheus but only truly realized here. And they're all developed mesmerizingly via a Michael Fassbender performance (performances, really) to die for. The xenomorph is a sideshow, honestly. The movie (after a brief prologue) begins and ends with Fassbender's android in isolation, and I can't think of a better way for the film to introduce its most compelling character—it's this guy you should be watching. Grade: A-

Nocturnal Animals (2016)
The first thing you'll notice about Nocturnal Animals is its exquisite formalism—this movie looks ravishing, nearly every frame (especially within the nighttime scenes) crafted with the eye of a master stylist. In fact, it looks so great that the second thing you notice might not even register on any level but a naggingly subconscious one. But pay attention; this second thing is very important, and that is that this movie kind of sucks. Aside from its stunning formal achievements (nothing to sneeze at, believe me), the movie is a failure on nearly all narrative and structural metrics. Splitting the story between a "real life" art gallery owner (Amy Adams) and an enactment of the novel manuscript she's reading, the movie cross-cuts between the psychological Expressionism of Amy Adams's plot (where the novel, written by her ex-husband, triggers memories of her tumultuous relationship with the author) and the B-movie smut of the novel's boilerplate murder/revenge saga. The B-movie segments are by-far the superior of the two halves, but by switching frequently between the occasionally robust novel narrative and the positively anemic and thin Amy Adams plot, the film saps the energy out of all of it. At least it's pretty to look at. Grade: C

Fireworks Wednesday (چهارشنبه سوری) (2006)
Released in Iran a decade ago but only recently in the United States, Fireworks Wednesday is a minor, early work by Iranian master Asghar Farhadi. But given that this is Farhadi, of course "minor" still means "quite good." Containing elements of the domestic thriller that Farhadi would later refine to high art, Fireworks recognizably belongs with his filmography, a tense, often exciting, ultimately crushing drama involving a marital spat and the housekeeper unlucky enough to be positioned between the spouses. It's a much looser, less precise feature, being split between the two spouses, than the taut, brutally efficient plotting of A Separation or The Past, but the grounding of the film in the housekeeper's POV is an interesting wrinkle, using her limited knowledge to craft the film into a low-key mystery. Farhadi wouldn't achieve real greatness until his next feature, About Elly, but Fireworks Wednesday is a robust accomplishment regardless. Grade: B+

Solaris (2002)
I haven't read the original Stanisław Lem novel, but word on the street is that when adapting the book—a tall order, given that it already had a masterful and beloved adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky (my least-favorite Tarkovsky, but of course great nonetheless)—Steven Soderbergh aimed to stick closer to the novel's vibes than the earlier Soviet classic. I can't tell you if Soderbergh succeeded on that metric, but on a regular old movie metric, Soderbergh's Solaris succeeds tremendously, maybe even as much as Tarkovsky's. Relative to the Soviet classic, there are definitely far fewer color-tinted driving, and the runtime is handsomely trimmed by a third (both welcome modifications), and in general, the vibe is much more tactile than the occasionally opaque Tarkovsky touch—we really feel the tangible reality of these characters, which makes it all the more unsettling when their identity is called into question. It's a hypnotic, creepy, and fascinating film; in re-adapting classic source material, Soderbergh crafts one of his absolute best. Grade: A-

Music

Kendrick Lamar - DAMN. (2017)
DAMN. is not as good as any of Kendrick Lamar's last three releases. But since that is just to say that DAMN. is not a mind-bending masterpiece, that's not really much of a qualification. So how about this: DAMN. is Lamar's most scattered, inconsistent release yet, and it's one where he, seemingly intentionally, plays up his most #problematic characteristics—his use of the word "bitch," his depictions of women, etc.—in the interest of rigorous self-reflection that sometimes feels more like some dissonant combination of punishment and aggrandizement than commentary. Which is its own kind of commentary, and interesting commentary at that. But an "interesting" work is not necessarily a successful one. DAMN. is certainly successful—very successful, even—in stretches: the scathing, Fox-News-gutting "DNA.", the despairing, world-weary "FEEL.", the U2-featuring "X*X.", to name a few. It's cool to see Kendrick performing in what is, on the surface, a more mainstream-ready sound than he's touched in several years, and that's offset nicely by what is probably the most interior, abstract concept he's yet tackled—basically, a at-times stream-of-consciousness exploration of the competing impulses of his psyche and the ways that manifests itself in his life, his relationships, and his belief in God (lampshaded most prominently by the juxtaposition of mirror-image track concepts: "LUST." followed by "LOVE.", etc.). But the execution of that concept is where things get a bit dicey, not just because the track-to-track excellence wavers (e.g. I'm not a huge fan of "LOVE." or "LUST.") but because his commitment to the concept itself is slippery. Parts of the album are as incisive and biting as Kendrick Lamar has ever been, but other sections feel only cursorily thought through, skimming over the surface of interesting issues. It's not fatally flawed, and given the way Lamar's music has a way of opening up and metamorphosing over time, I may be premature in writing this review. But as it is, the album feels wounded in such a way that keeps it from stretching up toward greatness. Grade: B+

Favorite Music of 2016

2016 has been a rough year by most metrics, and 2017 isn't looking to be much better. But one thing we can take comfort in is that, regardless of circumstance, the arts reminded us of beauty and pain and awe with the firm insistence that has characterized them since time immemorial. The arts are the distillation of the human tenacity into objects, be they digital or plastic or vinyl, and 2016 music was in no short supply of striking and unshakeable human objects. Below, you can find catalogued the ones that struck me the most, although even more than usual, culling this list down to just ten was a mighty challenge.

My usual blind spots persist, although they are shrinking: metal has no presence on this list and occupied a pretty narrow band of my total listening habits in 2016, and for such a rich year in hip-hop releases, my listening probably did not give the genre what it deserved. But it is what it is, and what this is is my favorite albums and songs from the year. Enjoy!

[Note: I started weekly reviews this year, so in the interest of not being redundant, if I had reviewed one of these albums this year, I've simply linked to the review page rather than create a new blurb.]

Favorite Albums:

1. David Bowie: Blackstar
We lost so many artists in 2016 that it's frightening to even begin to count them, but losing Bowie really, really stung, all the more so because Bowie's music felt more alive than it had in a decade at least. Blackstar ranks among the late legend's masterpieces, and what—in that blissful weekend that separated the release of this album from the man's death—initially seemed to be one of Bowie's strangest works soon snapped into focus as one of his most openly personal. Scratch that: not just one of his most personal—one of the most personal albums of all time. "You know I'll be free, just like that bluebird," he sings. "Ain't that just like me?" Exactly like David Bowie: brilliant.

2. Esperanza Spalding: Emily's D+Evolution


[Read original review here]

3. Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool


[Read original review here]

4. Kendrick Lamar: untitled unmastered


[Read original review here]

5. Beyoncé: Lemonade


[Read original review here]

6. Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith: A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke


[Read original review here]

7. Shearwater: Jet Plane and Oxbow


[Read original review here]

8. Margo Price: Midwest Farmer's Daughter


[Read original review here]

9. Regina Spektor: Remember Us to Life


[Read original review here]

10. Jenny Hval: Blood Bitch


[Read original review here]









Great 2016 Songs Not On These Albums:

Black Mountain: "Mothers of the Sun"—Black Mountain's 2016 album, IV, evokes Black Sabbath all over the place, but this opening track is probably the Sabbathiest, a grimy, relentless march of classic-rock-style heavy metal with a killer riff. It's apologetically nostalgic; it's also apologetically awesome.

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Cry"— "He never wants to strip down to his feelings/He never wants to kiss and close his eyes" is the sort of is-it-cheesy-or-well-observed line that has become Carly Rae's bread and butter. But the real charm here is the crystalline production, which gives the song the rich, faux-'80s sound that's become the 2010s bread and butter.

Car Seat Headrest: "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales"—The dirty secret of this "songs" section is that a lot of these picks are just chances for me to acknowledge albums that might have made the Top 10 if I had had a chance to spend more time with them. In the case of Car Seat Headrest's Teens of Denial, you've got a batch of literate, prickly-sweet indie rock songs of the variety that we might have heard from Pavement had they kept in the direction they started with on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Although to be precise, this pick, the standout "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales," sounds a lot more Weezer-y. Which is cool, too. Whatever the case, it's a fantastic song from an album I really need to hear more from.

Chance the Rapper (feat. T-Pain, Kirk Franklin, Eryn Allen Kane, Noname): "Finish Line"—Chance the Rapper spun gold out of the "gospel rap" sound that both he and Kanye touted this year. Of the two, Chance wins the gospel rap crown by a country mile, and this is exhibit A.

Brian Eno: "Fickle Sun (iii) I'm Set Free"—I'm not sure if this Velvet Underground cover makes sense outside of the context of its place as the closer for Brian Eno's solid album from early in 2016. But as a climax to a classically spacey Eno record, it's sublime.

INGA: "Volunteered Slavery"—I don't even know where I found this song. It was some random Bandcamp download. But it's a great little piece of modern jazzy something or other.

Kamaiyah: "I'm On"—A great rags-to-riches brag. Kamaiyah is one of several promising young voices to ascend the hip-hop ladder recently, and I'm all for that. She's a tremendously captivating MC.

Maps Need Reading: "Altar Ego"—Local Knoxville band spot here. Maps Need Reading released their debut album this year, and this 12-minute opus is far and away the best song on it. Recalling bits of Rush and Genesis and Pink Floyd while still establishing its own sonic identity, "Altar Ego" is fantastic justification of Maps Need Reading's central spot in Knoxville's prog scene.

M83: "Solitude"—M83's album Junk was dismissed as kitschy and hollow. I didn't spend enough time with it to know if that's true (and to be honest, I generally don't love M83 stuff to begin with), but "Solitude," with its majestic, cinematic sweep, is breathtaking. 

Noname: "Yesterday"—Noname just makes me smile. There's a joint humility and verve to her delivery that makes her music irresistible to me, and no more so is this true than in the opening track to her excellent 2016 mixtape, Telefone. Not that Chance is going anywhere, but Noname is the perfect inheritor to his throne as the feel-good conscious rapper of his era. Look her up if you haven't already.

PJ Harvey: "The Wheel"—A furious, scorched-earth rocker from one of alt-rock's perennial earth-scorchers. Harvey's foray into international social consciousness was kind of hit-and-miss this year, but this song, focusing on a small, almost inconsequential scene of photos fading in sunlight, is a powerful bit of Kosovo metonymy.

Preoccupations: "Degraded"—The band formerly known as "Viet Cong" lost little in the voyage from one name to the next. "Degraded" delivers the same characteristically aggressive post-punk you've come to expect from the band's debut last year, this time zeroing in a bit more intently on Joy Division as an influence.

Savages: "Evil"—And speaking of aggressive post-punk, get a load of Savages.

Solange: "Cranes in the Sky"—This is another "want to spend more time with the album" pick. Those harmonies! That chorus! It's a beautiful song every bit the equal to (and maybe even surpassing) the music put out by that other Knowles woman this year.

Kanye West: "Saint Pablo"—Even by the scattered logic of contemporary Kanye releases, The Life of Pablo was an especially scattered album, but in the wreckage of what has turned out to be an unfortunately unfortunate 2016 for Ye, we can still pick out the jewels, and "Saint Pablo" is chief among them. In light of what the last few months of the year looked like for Kanye, "This generation's closest thing to Einstein/So don't worry about me, I'm fine" are a pair of lines that have taken on perhaps more meaning than the man himself ever intended, but if anything, West's music only becomes richer through the lens of the conflict between author and audience.

White Stag: "Mothouse"—More Knoxville pride. Of the two Knox prog bands represented here, White Stag is the clear visionary, infusing their 10-minute suites with ambient and black metal textures that place them on the vanguard of what's looking to be an exciting 2017 breakthrough.

Wilco: "We Aren't the World (Safety Girl)"—Modern-day Wilco is a band of two ambitions: the scrappy, noisy rock of 2015's Star Wars and the scrappy, finger-picking rock of 2016's Schmilco. Both versions feel intermittently tossed-off and brilliant, and I honestly prefer the noisier side of the band. But there's still lots to love about the quieter, more acoustic stylings, as evidenced by the sweet sarcasms of "We Aren't the World (Safety Girl)." "Let's pretend we're hundred-dollar bills, like so, and complain every day there's a spider in my soup," Tweedy sings, "Tired of my opinions like everybody else, is that so?" It's some of his best songwriting in recent years, and given how I don't at all agree with the meme of Wilco being in decline, that's saying something.