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 December 11 - 17, 2017

I'm not really sorry my Star Wars review is so long, but I suppose it deserves an admittance that calling such a review "mini" is sort of laughable. So laugh away.

Movies

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

Let's get this over with: The Last Jedi has the worst John Williams Star Wars score by a comfortable margin, and it's the first Star Wars movie that, despite some very nice imagery late in the film, doesn't strive for visual grandeur. The extent to which these two things will hamper your enjoyment of the film is entirely dependent on how much you value those things in Star Wars, and unfortunately for The Last Jedi, score and visual grandeur are two of the things I want most out of Star Wars, which makes their relative weaknesses two of three things that keep me from crowing with the rest of y'all that this is the first great Star Wars movie since the original trilogy. The third thing that keeps it from greatness is, I think, a bit less personally subjective and a bit more critically substantive, and that's the way that The Last Jedi glibly punts all its thorny philosophical questions in its finale. And oh boy, are there thorny philosophical questions—The Last Jedi wants to be a ruthless interrogation of several of the key philosophical frameworks of Star Wars, including the value of individual heroism and the necessity of the Jedi to defeat darkness. The fact that the movie is asking these questions in the first place and actually walks them right up to the brink of something truly radical within the franchise is a testament to how smartly writer/director Rian Johnson is engaging with this intellectual property, and the fact that he doesn't actually jump off that ledge is either a crippling moment of trepidation on Johnson's part or an exhibition of the exact length of the leash Kathleen Kennedy is keeping him on—I can't decide which. Regardless, there's no question that the movie, twisty and emotionally potent, is the most narratively engaging Star Wars movie since the original trilogy (which is, I suspect, what a lot of people mean when they call a movie "great" anyway), and it's the most seriously any Star Wars property has taken the franchise mythology since Lucas was in charge—i.e. engaging the series ideas as ideas and not sacred texts to emulate. It's also the least-seriously any Star Wars movie has taken the franchise since Lucas was in charge, by which I mean that there is very little reverence for the form that Star Wars has taken up to this point (which is why my above critiques of visuals and score strike me as possibly a missing of the point on my part); it has absolutely no fear of yanking the film into genres heretofore never explored in the franchise (there's a brief casino heist, e.g.), nor is it too timid to engage with the elements of slapstick and B-movie goofiness that people often like to forget has been a staple of the series since 1977. I mean, there's an honest-to-goodness allusion to "Hardware Wars," the 1978 parodic short film that Lucas considered his favorite Star Wars send-up. The tone of The Last Jedi is all over the place in the best way possible, and it's the life blood of this movie (and shout-out to Domhnall Gleeson, who is legitimately great in bringing the sort of Laurel-and-Hardy comedy to his role as villain that the Star Wars villainy has always teetered on the edge of). In this regard, The Last Jedi feels a lot like—God help me—the prequel films, which (intentionally or not) are on a narrative level a pretty dedicated repudiation of the Hero's Journey and Jedi mythos and on a tonal level a grab bag of silly aliens, operatic character types, and genre experimentation. This isn't a bad thing, and you know what? The prequels aren't really that bad either, at least not on the hysterical level that an overly incensed nerd culture has made them out to be. I bet Rian Johnson would have put midi-chlorians in this movie if Disney had let him. Grade: B+

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

I.e. "Collateral Damage? What's That?": The Movie. Honestly, for a film that knows how to make its killing so tactile and viscerally impactful, it cares shockingly little about human life outside of that of John Wick and his antagonist, Santino D'Antonio, whose lives seem to hold nearly cosmic importance within the increasingly byzantine world of this franchise. "The man, the myth," one character greets our hero, and he's basically right; John Wick has essentially become Achilles (or is it Macbeth?) and the world around him some sort of Olympian stage made entirely of penthouse suites and art galleries, upon which he battles other limber deific actors as he lumbers through the motions of some grand drama (or perhaps tragedy). In that sense, the heightened levels of myth-making position Chapter 2 much better to comment on its own violence than its more grounded predecessor, as the narrative's own grandiose aims excuse us from caring about anyone but our principal players, in the same way that only pesky humanists care about the way Hamlet sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern gleefully to their deaths. But I'm sort of getting ahead of myself—who cares about all this moral philosophizing when the movie looks so freaking COOL? If the whole cinematic tradition of hall-of-mirrors finales was merely a decades-long breadcrumb trail to get us to John Wick: Chapter 2's climax, I'd say that sounds about right. Grade: A-

Columbus (2017)

Surely I'm not the first person to have gotten Lost in Translation vibes from Columbus, right? Ennui and low-key heartbreak set against an often alien-seeming geography? No matter—it's the sort of achingly beautiful work of film that deserves to be discussed on its own terms. From the exquisite framing of Columbus, Indiana's distinctive modern architecture to the warm but slightly prickly companionship that forms between our two protagonists through their small, intimate conversations, this is a movie that invites us to let its textures wash over us, small pieces making a small story with large feelings. Some of the plot feels a little by-the-numbers, but it's never not sincere in them, and there are moments of transcendence, too—e.g. when a character is asked to explain not the academic but the emotional reasons that make her love a particular edifice, and we're suddenly transported with the camera to the building's interior, watching her mouth through the glass as it emits words we'll never hear, the film's ambient score swelling for the first time. Grade: B+

On the Beach Alone at Night (밤의 해변에서 혼자) (2017)

To make what is probably a problematic comparison, this feels like Hong Sang-soo's Deconstructing Harry—a fragmented film that takes the director's tropes and cuts them into vignettes in the service of something that's halfway between penance and apologia for his sexual misdeeds (though admirably, Hong foregrounds the woman involved [Kim Min-hee, who absolutely owns this movie] and the effects of his behavior on her, as opposed to Allen's male-centric POV). Also as with Harry, there's a pretty sizable gap between the great success of individual scenes and the kind of shaky effect of the film's whole. The absolute best moments of the movie are a pair of long, liquor-fueled dinner-table conversations in the film's back half, live-wire sequences that play to the very best of Hong's abilities; the less pointed and kind of draggy connective tissue that ties these scenes (and a few other conversational setpieces) together works much less well, and I'm just not sure what to do with the flights of surreal metatextuality a la the repeated sleep/theater imagery (is this all a dream? just film fantasy?) and the recurring appearance of a mysterious man who really needs to know the time and can clean windows like nobody's business. It's an interesting experiment, one that feels decidedly less schematic than last year's Right Now, Wrong Then (the other Hong film I've seen) but also much less warm and approachable. Grade: B-

Che (2008)

Sort of American Indie's response to Spike Lee's Malcolm X, in the sense that it's an epic biopic of a controversial, martyred radial leader. Che has little of the sensuality of Lee's ecstatic humanism, Soderbergh instead opting for a vérité digital cinematography that, for all its you-are-there POVing, has a sort of chilly distance to it that rarely tries to dramatize the experience of Che's passion in the same way that we all become Malcolm. There's beauty in that starkness, though, particularly in Part One, which juxtaposes the grainy b&w of Guevara's UN visit with the broad political sweep of his Fidel-collaborating actions in Cuba. Part Two, a beat-for-beat breakdown of his fatal involvement in Bolivian guerrilla warfare, is much more formally straightforward and not nearly as interesting to me; still, the slow dismemberment of the Bolivian revolution is compellingly meticulous and thrilling in parts, so I can't complain too much. Taken as a whole, this is a pretty striking accomplishment. Grade: B+

Music

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Polygondwanaland (2017)

The fourth (!) of five (!!!) albums released by King Gizzard, and though they've all been good, Polygondwanaland is my favorite. It's possible that I'm just cheap—Polygondwanaland (how many times do I have to type that name?) was released online for free, and hey, I like free things. But more than that, (here we go again) Polygondwanaland seems particularly curated to my specific interests. It's not that King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard with their psych-rock silliness are ever too far afield of my interests. But the way that this album doubles down on the proggy legacy of psychedelia delights me in a way that I imagine not all modern listeners can relate to, and with the cover looking like a trippy screenshot from Ultima Underworld, I'm basically in heaven here. I do wish the band would reach a little beyond the same psych-prog palette that's existed for over 40 years now—look, y'all are already weird, but can we get freaky weird?—but that's a minor gripe, considering how good the Gizzard boys are at what they do. Grade: A-