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 November 6 - 12, 2017

Get 'em while they're hot.

Movies

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017)

There's that old Howard Hawks aphorism about a good movie being "three good scenes and no bad ones," and I'd say this applies almost to the letter, though it's frustratingly without any great scenes. It's the sort of well-observed, literate film that Noah Baumbach could make in his sleep (probably while dreaming about The Squid and the Whale, whose plot Meyerowitz uncannily resembles), and as such, it plays perfectly to Baumbach's strengths without reaching for any of the fresh air that's made his recent Greta Gerwig collaborations so exciting. Even without his partner in the credits, though, the cast here is exquisite, likely saving the movie from being even more fractured and scene-based than it already is. I'm sure Sandler's going to get all the praise (and he deserves it), but really, there's not a bum note in the bunch. Grade: B+

The Little Hours (2017)

I haven't read The Decameron, the 14th-century source for this bawdy, bizarre comedy. But I've read The Canterbury Tales along with a few other works of literature of the era, and if it takes a murderer's row of modern alt-comedy actors and a metric ton of profane anachronisms to remind us of the valuable truth that human beings have always been as filthy-minded and irreverent as they are in our present age, then I welcome this experiment with open arms. Grade: B+

The Lure (Córki dancingu) (2015)

I guess between this and Raw, I'm now 2/2 for being ambivalent on non-English-language, off-format genre experiments in 2017. A sort of horror-musical take on "The Little Mermaid," The Lure has the winning premise out of those two, and unlike Raw, it actually goes for broke in executing that premise, full of all sorts of gore and appealingly weird mermaid tale kink. But the narrative is so lopsided that the movie nearly topples—the whole inciting incident of a love-struck mermaid gaining legs in trade for her voice appears 2/3 of the way through the movie, making that first hour almost tedious in the way it repetitiously establishes and re-establishes the world of the film and the last half hour an underdeveloped rush. Also, music-wise, this is no great shakes, though I'm willing to chalk that up to the fact that it's just no fun reading musical lyrics in subtitle. Grade: B-

Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015)

I went into this having misread the title as Einstein in Guantanamo, so this movie held at least two surprises, to say nothing of the rather intense sex scene in the movie's middle (though given The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, maybe that last bit shouldn't have shocked). But for all its narrative and stylistic energy, Peter Greenaway's retelling of Soviet cinema legend Sergei Eisenstein's time in Mexico is a film at odds with itself, its intensely playful editing and cinematographic manipulation weirdly cancelling out the centerpiece romance that informs the film's emotional heft, resulting in a film that's chilly and distantly admirable instead of actually engaging. Grade: C+

Snow on tha Bluff (2011)

I watched this unaware of whether it was a documentary or a fictional drama. It turns out it's mostly the latter, something that becomes kind of evident through a few too pat dialogue scenes, but as a found-footage drama, particularly one that lives in that disorienting haze of between reality and movie, this is electric and frightening in the manner of Greek tragedy or cosmic horror. The lightly fictionalized life of actual Atlanta dealer Curtis Snow is one beset by ancient forces; agency is something only wildly grasped at beneath the towers of the ruling elite of the Atlanta skyline, whose apathetic spires are glimpsed from a distance, gods under whose heel any gesture toward legal, middle-class functionality seems like nonsense. The execution is sometimes bumpy, most so in the one-on-one scenes with Snow's ex-girlfriend (which most strain the credulity of the home-movie premise), but the conceit is perfect. Grade: B+

5 Centimeters per Second (秒速5センチメートル) (2007)

A triptych of stories plays a long-distance romance in fast forward over the film's spry hour-long runtime. Being a Makoto Shinkai movie, it's of course gorgeously animated, each detail of each frame a marvel of specificity and vibrancy; also being a Makoto Shinkai movie, the beautiful animation provides the backdrop for a teen romance played to nearly operatic intensity, and as always, this is the part of the film that occasionally warbles. But even so, each of the three chapters have moments of such stunning beauty that any quibbles with tone become sort of secondary to the ability of Shinkai to instill even relatively terrestrial human interactions with a sense of the sublime. My favorite comes at the end of the second chapter, which is told through the eyes of a character outside the central romance looking in; even the bittersweet final minutes of the movie don't begin to approximate the deep pathos of the precise second when the rocket launches. You'll know it when you see it. Grade: B+

Television

The Show About the Show, Season 1 (2015-17)

A bonkers, meta, hilarious, and altogether genius web series made by Caveh Zahedi (whose work I am unfamiliar with but will likely seek out after this)—each episode is about the making of the previous episode, which subjects the normal human tensions inherent in collaborative creation to a kind of geometric growth. An episode is divided into two different formats: the first being Zahedi's rambling, Woody-Allen-esque to-the-camera monologues recounting his memories of the previous episode's creation, with the second being the recreated scenes to illustrate Zahedi's memories. This interplay between Zahedi's monologue and the collaborative recreation leads to increasingly tense and nutty escalations of relatively mundane conflicts. For example, during the pitching of the show, Zahedi's wife expressed some ambivalent feelings about the project, which in turn leads Zahedi to recount that in his monologue during the pilot, which then forces him to have his wife recreate the moment in which she's unsure of his vision, a prospect that his wife is unenthusiastic about, which then leads to Zahedi mentioning her reluctance in his monologue in Episode 2 (about the creation of the pilot), which means that he has to convince his wife to act out their previous interaction, which makes her a bit more disgruntled, and so on. Given how central recreations are to the premise, it's unclear just how much of this is "real," and that's both the point and beside the point, as you can take this as either trenchant commentary on media representation or as just an excuse for crazy hijinks. It's a wild, uproarious feedback loop that gets more hectic as it goes until the final two episodes culminate in some truly horrifying, UK-The-Office-style comic tragedy that's as bracing as it is laugh-out-loud funny. This is not going to be everyone's ballgame, and I'm sure most are going to find it to be an eye-rolling postmodern wank-fest (especially given Zahedi's hubris, although like the aforementioned Woody Allen, I'd say this apparent dickishness is intentional at least as often as it isn't). But it's absolutely my ballgame, one of the most engaging TV experiments I've seen recently. (P.S. It's all on YouTube, and you can watch it here. It's only about 90 minutes, so why not?) Grade: A

Books

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart (2009)

YA novels often have a problem with voice, where the opening chapters are usually intoxicating and distinctive before giving way to more pedestrian prose (lest I sound too high and mighty, this one of many fears I have with my own novel, but you don't want to hear about that). The Disreputable History is one of the more disappointing iterations of that trend, given just how strongly the first few chapters promise a witty, erudite deconstruction of the East-Coast private school patriarchy. And it's not that the book isn't that; it's just maybe a bit more sedate and traditional an execution of that than the beginning of the novel suggests, grounded (appropriately, I suppose) as much in the world of teen hookups and relationship drama as it is in the tearing down of systematic ideas. Regardless of what I want the book to be, though, it's still a great deal of fun, and our protagonist, Frankie, is an engaging and winsome guide. So no matter what we hoped for—let's celebrate what we got. Grade: B+

Music

SZA - Ctrl (2017)

This will likely end up as my favorite musical debut of 2017. Solána Rowe, alias SZA, croons her smooth R&B melodies with grace and abundant personality, reminiscent of last year's Solange and Noname releases in its warm, empowered sound. If there's any justice in contemporary pop music (and the gigantic success of "Love Galore," the album's second single, seems to indicate that there is), she's going to be the next big thing. It's not flawless, but it's a way better pop debut than the world deserves this year. Grade: B+