Favorite Music of 2024

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.

4. Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross: Challengers (Original Score)
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.

5. Mdou Moctar: Funeral for Justice
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.

6. Sea Urchin: Destroy!
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.

7. Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us
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.

8. Oranssi Pazuzu: Muuntautuja
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.

9. Nala Sinephro: Endlessness
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.

10. Ches Smith: Laughing Ash
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.

Favorite Music of 2021

I don't have a lot of words for my music habits this year. The paradox of my 2021 in music is that I'm listening to more music than ever, but I feel like I'm increasingly disconnected from the broader culture of music. I guess this is what all those old people have been warning me about for so long. Now, as an old person myself, I'm joining the chorus: [Abe Simpson voice] It could happen to you. But in all seriousness, really great year for music. Per usual, I missed out on more rap and metal than I'd like, and also, unusually, I feel like I'm starting the fall out of touch with modern jazz in favor of experimental and ambient music. Being old is weird.

As always, feel free to share your own favorites! That's the best part of year-end list-making anyway. Hope you enjoy my picks and maybe find something enjoyable that you didn't already know about!

Favorite Albums:

1. Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra: Promises
Hasn't lost a single bit of its power since I first heard it. A masterpiece whose nuances keep unfolding with every subsequent listen.

[Read original review]

 

2. Mdou Moctar: Afrique Victime
One of my best memories of 2021 is cruising around Knoxville in my car just blasting this album—and I hate driving, so that should tell you something about the transformative power of Afrique Victime. A great guitar album, a great mind-expanding album, a great album in general. I liked it a lot in the beginning, but it's grown even more positively on me since.

[Read original review]

3. Annie Hart: Everything Pale Blue
Remains a beautiful warm blanket of an album that I love to wrap myself in.

[Read original review]

4. Blue Lick: Hold On, Hold Fast
Otherwise known as plan-period-core. Listened to this untold times as I assembled Romeo and Juliet lessons. The wittiest spoken word with the coolest instrumentals.

[Read original review]

5. SPELLLING: The Turning Wheel
A sprawling everything-and-the-kitchen-sink epic, evoking everything from indie pop to freak folk to prog to synth rock to glitch to X-Files theme music to baroque to goth to ambient... etc. It's transfixing and utterly unpredictable, particularly the brooding, subterranean second half of this double album. This is all bolstered by the surreal flights of fantasy that the lyrics take. A carnival funhouse of an album, only if that funhouse was also a cosmic rumination on life in the context of a grand, unknowable universe. I'm going for the big adjectives because otherwise, this album is pretty singular and hard to describe. More "indie" music like this, please.

6. Olivia Block: Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea
On her Bandcamp page, Block describes the premise of this album as imagining the pandemic as a sci-fi movie, with the album being the score for that movie. She also says she was on mushrooms a lot in composing the record. That all makes sense to me. This is an album whose sweeping synth and mellotron landscapes feel cinematic in scope, while also being punctuated by strange, even psychedelic flourishes. It's gorgeous and mysterious and everything I like out of modern experimental music.

7. NYX & Gazelle Twin: Deep England
This is apparently a reinterpretation of a 2018 Gazelle Twin album called Pastoral, which I'm not familiar with. But apparently it's the same sort of thing: using a fusion of electronic music and English folk music to evoke a pre-Christian England that comments on the English national identity and specifically the kind of reactionary nationalism that has motivated Brexit and that sort of thing. It's a very cool, very witchy record. This album first came on my radar because of its ominous cover of the already ominous "Fire Leap" from the movie The Wicker Man, itself a commentary on England's modern identity in relation to its past. I'm not sure if "folk horror" can exist as a musical genre in addition to a film genre, but if so, Deep England is it.

8. William Maranci: Meat Mountain
I've always thought of William Maranci as a fun, funny, but ultimately kind of disposable mashup artist, nowhere near the ecstatic heights of Neil Cicierega; Maranci is much more willing to play to the cheap seats to get an easy laugh (see "Bohemian Wapsody" later in this post). There's nothing wrong with that; Maranci works hard to commit to every bit he cooks up, and the results are often amusing. That style just isn't usually sustainable over an album length. Until now, I guess. Meat Mountain feels like a major level up for Maranci, often approaching something closer to plunderphonics than straightforward sound-clownery. It's kind of majestic.

9. Xiu Xiu: OH NO
It's nowhere near as weird as 2019's Girl with Basket of Fruit, but what is? Instead, OH NO is a kind of collaborative celebration, though as usual; it may sound weird to describe a Xiu Xiu record as celebratory, and the music itself retains the band's vaguely unsettling, open-wound sound. But the production of the album is so full of guests that it feels warm and communal all the same. Each song is a duet, and the artists brought for those duets on form a veritable Who's Who of modern left-of-center indie (Sharon Van Etten, Twin Shadow, Liars, Chelsea Wolfe, etc.). Taken as a whole, the project and its host of voices become a tribute to the power of human connection. OH NO, am I talking about collective action again?

10. Squid: Bright Green Field
Rock music had it's most exciting year in recent memory with a wave of ambitious bands coming out of the UK, including Black Midi and Black Country, New Road. Squid was the one of those groups whose release I got into most (I feel like if I'd spent more time with the Black Midi album, it would be in this spot, though). Like a lot of the others, it's a post-punk album with an experimental edge—in this case, you've got some Talking-Heads-ish guitar work stretched into fascinating contortions as songs extend into 6, 7, or 8 minute epics under the sway of the hypnotically repetitive yelps of vocalist Ollie Judge. The strange, often abrasive edges of this record aren't for everyone, but I sure enjoyed it.

Great 2021 Songs Not On These Albums:

Adele: "To Be Loved"—I still need to spend more time (read: any time) with the new Adele album, but this one song has really wormed its way into my head. Probably Adele's most impressive vocal performance in her career in terms of how dynamic it is, as well as some of the most moving songwriting of her career, too. Her album has made some waves for being more sonically adventurous than her previous work, and in some ways, "To Be Loved" is pure convention: a weepy, classicist piano ballad about love. But this track also feels daring and comparatively experimental in terms of just how much it commits to its slow emotional crescendo—it is the *most* Adele song, and the fact that it's so saturated on the pure concept of delivering that, it feels paradoxically like something new.

Fleet Foxes: "Sunblind (Solstice Version)"—This was my favorite song off of last year's Fleet Foxes album, so of course it's the standout on the Fleet Foxes live album that came out late this year. The song feels cathartic even with just Pecknold and his guitar alone in a church.

Dylan Henner: "2nd Movement"—I'm really just putting it on here because it introduced me to Su Tissue's 1984 album Salon de Musique, which is a great, extremely hard-to-find record of minimalism. Henner basically recreates this piece from that album whole-cloth because, in the words of the liner notes of the album this came from, "Su’s work is too rare to warrant changing." Agreed.

illuminati hotties: "MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA"—A weird thing keeps happening where illuminati hotties songs sneak onto my year-end lists, despite me not listening to much illuminati hotties stuff otherwise. The full record didn't grab me, but I was addicted to this unhinged lead single. Channeling big Kim Gordon energy.

Eiko Ishibashi: "contentless dream"—I reviewed this as an album, but I'm counting it as a "song" here. Whatever. It's my blog. This track is still mesmerizing.

Lil Nas X: "MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)"—Really, I'm just happy he's still having a good time with musical success and trolling the haters along the way. Good song, too.

Machine Listener: "Mineral Wells"—A subtle current in my 2021 listening was me discovering that I love analog synths now. In light of that, this track is 9 minutes of bliss: a cross between '90s trance and '70s kosmische musik that I just couldn't get enough of.

William Maranci: "Bohemian Wapsody"—Did you ever wonder what "WAP" would sound like if it were "Bohemian Rhapsody"? Me neither, but here's this. Puerile; also incredibly clever (like "WAP" itself).

Megan Thee Stallion: "Thot Shit"—Megan Thee Stallion takes a well-deserved victory lap of a year, the peak of which was this track, an exuberant declaration of absolute sovereignty over the hip-hop world. She's right; nobody on her tier of pop-rap even tries to match her serpentine rhymes and unstoppable flows—and why would you when you would face such withering contempt from her majesty at even having attempted to touch the untouchable? In some ways, she's the last bastion of genuine word-smithery in radio rap in an environment increasingly reliant on producers and vibes over lyrics, but in other ways, one gets the impression that she simply murdered all the other contenders by sheer force of personality.

Radiohead: "Follow Me Around"—Most of the previously unheard material from the new Kid A / Amnesiac reissue (Kid A Mnesia, natch) feels like the product of shuffling through the bottom of the near-empty bin leftover from the legendary recording sessions that birthed Radiohead's two early-millennium masterpieces: incomplete scraps of ideas, instrumental stems, unused production experiments, etc. The collection is mixed together in a pretty cool way that makes a good case for this archival material being released, but it didn't yield many actual songs. One of the few exceptions is "Follow Me Around," a for-real song previously only heard live. The studio version is a slinky little folk song, just Thom Yorke and an acoustic guitar. It's a rare treat to hear Radiohead in this form, and as a Radiohead fanatic (I think I'm probably fooling myself to call myself anything else at this point), I lapped it up.

Olivia Rodrigo: "good 4 u"—Seems like everyone found something to like about Olivia Rodrigo this year. This song reminds me of Paramore (it apparently reminds Rodrigo's team of Paramore, too), a band I was never heavily into but nonetheless have a certain nostalgia for. So I listened to this one a lot. I guess that's the level of sophistication on which I'm engaging with pop these days.

SAULT: "Bitter Streets"—I don't know much about SAULT, but their album 'NINE' was pretty cool this year. That album has a lot of modes, but this—hooky, groovily produced neo-soul—is my favorite from the record.

Sufjan Stevens & Angelo De Augustine: "Reach Out"—This is kind of a placeholder from the album it's from (A Beginner's Mind), which just barely didn't make the cut for my album top 10. This is just my favorite tune from the record. Allegedly inspired by Wings of Desire (still need to see that movie), but even having not seen the film, it's still profound. Too many great lyrics to quote them all, but "I come from conscience where there is no conjugation" might be my favorite single line of the year, from any song.

Taylor Swift: "All Too Well (10 Minute Version)"—Weird to think that I'm now enough of a Taylor Swift fan to be pandered to, but boy golly, did I love this pandering as much as every other slobbering fan who lapped up this long-mythologized, heretofore unheard "original" version of Taylor Swift's best song. Messier and meaner than the original, and you have to wonder if Jake Gyllenhaal deserves some sympathy for having millions of Swifties descend upon him for being a bad boyfriend in a relationship that lasted a couple of months a decade ago. But this song rocks. Best new line: "I was never good at telling jokes, but the punch line goes, 'I'll get older, but your lovers stay my age.'" Dead.

Tindersticks: "Man Alone (Can't Stop the Fadin')"—I dunno what this song is about (isolation? fading?), but it sure feels paranoid and jittery. Its 11 minutes are a journey through some really ominous loops and repetitions and what feels like found sounds. I haven't paid attention to Tindersticks since their '90s stuff, and this is certainly a cool change of pace from the exquisite, baroque compositions the band produced then.

Jessie Ware: "Please (12" Extended Mix)"—An unstoppable disco bop. What else is there to say?

Wet Leg: "Chaise Longue"—Wet Leg has only released four songs as of right now, and all of them have been bangers to one degree or another. But this, their first, is the bangest, for sure. It kinda feels like Wet Leg's litany of sonic and cultural '90s-indie references are a bit to calibrated to my tastes to trust, but if the music is this good, who am I to complain?

Mini Reviews for June 7 - 13, 2021

Sometimes I don't have anything to say here. This week is one of those times.

Movies

Saint Maud (2019)
A psychological horror movie about a recently converted woman purportedly receiving messages from God and going through all the wild, ecstatic medieval prophet experiences. I do love that this movie unironically appropriates a lot of church tradition into its characterization of this woman, and I'm positively elated that this movie reminds us that a lot of people in the first millennium who became saints claimed to get spontaneous orgasms from God—we need to bring back Weird Bodily Christianity. It's also a dialogue with/deconstruction of the idea that piety and suffering are linked, which is interesting, though I do think that the movie could have been more specific with her theology; mostly, the movie just focuses on her feeling guilty about sex (welcome to Christianity, baby) and struggling with silence from God (welcome to the human experience, baby), both of which are fine but kind of broad strokes for a movie about a literal prophet, and I guess I'm the nerd who would have liked for her to have had more space to give her whole manifesto on her beliefs. Also, I didn't think the horror elements added anything to this movie except a marketing angle. So I guess what I'm saying is that I wish this were just First Reformed with ecstatic visions. The way I'm talking about this movie makes it sound like I didn't like it, but I did! It's just the kind of good movie that's easy to imagine being a lot better, which is a nagging feeling to have in a movie. Grade: B

Land (2021)
Woman goes out to the wilds of Wyoming in a possibly self-destructive impulse to isolate herself in a quest to overcome personal tragedy. This movie feels awkwardly positioned between the meditative stillness of Kelly Reichardt and a more conventional grief-recovery drama in the vein of Wild or something like that. It doesn't fully commit to either mode, and as a result, the movie never truly excels at anything either, despite there being some good ideas batted around. I don't know if this makes sense outside of my head, but to me, this movie felt so self-conscious in second-guessing all of those ideas that it could never settle into anything all that interesting. Grade: C

 

Simon Killer (2012)
This definitely feels like a large step down from Afterschool as far as written/directed by Antonios Campos goes, in terms of both its thematic and aesthetic ambitions (neither of which feel as radical or prescient here as in that earlier movie, while also kind of re-treading some of the same ideas re: screens and white male psychology). But it's still a fairly engaging, bleak character analysis, where the slow revelation of the true rottenness of our protagonist's soul is almost as compelling as it is sickening. There are also some really sublime visual moments and needle drops that give me chilly echoes of Lynne Ramsay or Claire Denis—not exactly sure how to square that with this movie's narrative, but it's cool nonetheless. Grade: B

The Room (2003)
Tommy Wiseau is a legitimately riveting screen presence, and there is definitely something sui generis about his bizarre acting inflections and writing style. At this movie's best, there's something truly arresting and surreal about its idiosyncrasies. So I understand completely how this became such an object of fascination, though it seems like willful hyperbole to call this "the worst movie ever made" or even include it in those conversations. But everything else about the movie is either super boring or wildly misogynist, and the whole thing feels kind of sad and immature in a depressing way, so it was hard for me to completely buy into this as a wild laugh-fest either. So I dunno. Eh. The memes are still good, though. Grade: C

The Juniper Tree (1990)
A revisionist take on a Brothers Grimm story with a heavy Ingmar Bergman vibe—this movie is going to probably live and die for you based on how much either of those two things appeal to you. The original Brothers Grimm story is wickedly bizarre, and this version does a good job of making it a story with actual recognizable human beings, so I like that. And you know that I LOVE Ingmar Bergman. Also, this stars pre-Sugarcubes Björk, so it's not as if there was any chance of me not liking this movie at least a little bit. It's good, if a bit stiff in the way that a lot of Bergman imitators can sometimes be. Grade: B+

 

Roger & Me (1989)
I generally find Michael Moore insufferably smarmy and intellectually dishonest, and with this movie, he basically popularized my least-favorite kind of documentary, i.e. the personality-centric, ironic-music-cue-reliant activist doc. But the one thing Moore can usually be counted on is to give his best material when focused on his hometown of Flint, which this film is thoroughly, and the naked populist fury of Roger & Me is virtually unmatched in both Moore's career and the careers of his numerous imitators. You've got the usual Moore shenanigans here, like his mostly worthless "I must talk to GM CEO Roger Smith" quest and the fictitious chronology implied (e.g. acting as if the construction of AutoWorld was in response to GM factory closures despite plans for its construction predating them by at least a decade is dumb, and honestly a truly chronological documentary detailing the decades of public planning failure in Flint could probably have given a more compelling, sobering context to the GM closures), but the film's central issue is so narrow in scope that even these indulgent tangents tie in a lot better than similar gestures do in, say, Bowling for Columbine. Plus, the whole Flint/GM milieu is parochial enough that Moore is actually able to make this movie almost entirely original footage; a lot of later Moore docs rely heavily on already public footage, e.g. George W. Bush reading to school children during the 9/11 attacks, meaning that most of what Moore adds are his irritating self-insert antics, but here instead, while we do get those antics, they're intercut mostly with some truly searing footage taken by Moore's actual crew—genuinely chaotic and heartbreaking stuff like evictions on the one hand, and on the other hand, some absolutely outrageous "bread and circuses" behavior from the wealthy and powerful of Flint. On the latter, I think you'd probably have to go to The Act of Killing or Errol Morris's documentaries on McNamara and Rumsfeld to find a more stunning example of a documentarian allowing his subjects to tie their own nooses. In one scene, a bunch of rich people throw a literal Gatsby party and then, in full roaring twenties attire, talk to the camera about how their daughter got to do ballet so life in Flint isn't so bad and poor people need to stop complaining so much; in another, some other rich people have a party in a soon-to-be-opened prison complex during which the party-goers play-act as inmates and prison guards, joyfully swinging around clubs and sporting riot gear; in another, a GM lobbyist, imagining he is giving some grand rebuttal to Moore's inquiries, says that it's impossible for corporations to care for their workers' well-being under capitalism. Just some of the bleakest, most astounding examples of people unwittingly advocating against their own existence that I've ever seen. Grade: A-

Music

Mdou Moctar - Afrique Victime (2021)
Basically just Tuareg guitarist Mahamadou "Mdou Moctar" Souleymane absolutely shredding over 42 minutes of strongly rhythmic fusion music. A lot of "fusion" is basically just jazz and rock mixed, but in this case, it's Saharan folk mixed with American rock. I can't say that I know a lot about West African music, but on the basis of this record, I would like to learn more, because this rules. One of my favorites of the year. Grade: A-