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 September 4 - 10, 2017

Several great movies and several movies I didn't like very much at all. This might be the most polarized set of scores I've had in a while.

Movies

It (2017)
This first entry in the duology adapting Stephen King's doorstop opus of coming-of-age horror has a lot of the same problems that recent adaptations of beloved literary properties have tended to have—namely, that it squanders pacing and characterization in favor of being slavishly devoted to visualizing every bit of the source material. This isn't always a bad impulse, and as a fan of King's work (and this novel in particular), I won't deny the thrill of certain iconic setpieces being recreated here; the mid-story fight with the monster in the decaying Victorian manor remains a highlight in both the movie and the book, as do the various surreal and horrifying impositions of IT into the children's day-to-day lives. However, what the faithfulness to the novel ends up meaning throughout most of this film is a heightened awareness of all the myriad ways the movie falls short of the novel's ambition, and it's not hard to begin imagining what a movie that took this story on its own terms would have been like. It almost certainly should have cut the number of kids down, for starters. The acting is uniformly excellent, but as with last year's It-indebted Stranger Things, the screenplay just isn't nimble enough to juggle the development of all seven characters in the Losers' Club. Most of them, in fact, are extremely shoddy personality types who give interesting quips from time to time but almost never show any life outside of that. This is most apparent with a barely there Mike, which is disheartening not just because he's the only black actor in the film's main cast but also because of his centrality to some of the historical atrocities of the town of Derry in the book, to which the movie only gives a passing nod (And it's also worth noting that the closer the movie sticks to the book, the harder it is to resist nitpicking the ways that it actually does change the book—case in point, Mike, whose role is probably disserviced most by the shifting of the action from the 1950s to the 1980s, burying the racial subtext to a lot of what happens to him—and in general, I'm not sure if the It story really works without the context of the urban decay that happened in that specific twenty-seven year period between the late '50s to the early '80s, although I guess we'll have to see how Chapter Two deals with this). Just as big of an issue is the way that, in a frantic need to hit every memorable part of the novel, the movie practically sprints through its plot. There's a fundamental lack of patience in the film that's bad for the character development and worse for the actual horror sequences, which flicker by with trigger-happy editing and lack the sort of intricate buildup that informs the best movie scare techniques. That said, as negative as I've been for the majority of this review, I want to stress that I had a good time with this movie. The acting, as I've said, is across-the-board great, a minor miracle when it comes to a cast as young as this one, and the kids are so good that they carry their characters a good deal farther than the thin screenplay has any right to earn; kudos also goes to Bill Skarsgård, who plays Pennywise/IT pitch-perfectly through all the effects. And the scares consistently deliver arresting imagery, if not the patient construction of mood and pace required for truly great horror—this is a tremendously shot movie, which makes it all the bigger shame that it's not edited better. There's also no discounting the sheer fun of seeing, as I did, a crowd-pleasing horror movie like this one in a packed theater with a responsive audience—which is to say, if you're interested in seeing this, go see it now rather than on home media. So yes, It offers a lot to enjoy; it's just all too easy to see how much better it could have been. Grade: B

Before I Fall (2017)

Most Groundhog Day-premised movies revolve around the central character's journey to become a better person through the sheer monotony of a day repeated ad infinitum—which is part of what makes Before I Fall's high school setting so promising, as high school for both students and teachers can often feel like an endless loop of indistinguishable days. And in the early going, Before I Fall fulfills this promise, with a litany of nice observations about the general mundanities and cruelties suffered and caused by high schoolers toward one another. But the deeper the film gets into the journey of its main character (a girl heavily ensconced in the "in" crowd of popular kids who like to bully each other and especially those outside their group), the more it becomes apparent that the film has confused its protagonist becoming a better person with its protagonist feeling like a better person. This is a movie in which half measures of decency are considered apt atonement to right the wrongs of years of torment—the central plot soon revolves around the twin foci of preventing the victim of long-term bullying and slander (in which our protagonist has eagerly taken part) from committing suicide and learning to make sure it's the nice guys who get sex. Both of these plots reveal a film with no real interest in fighting the actual social structures that makes the cruelty of teenagers so acute to begin with, and through the focus on the self-actualization of the main character—instead of, I dunno, the actual pain she's caused (and, like, actual pain, not how that pain relates to her)—turns the movie into an appeasing of conscience, not a meaningful statement on teenaged interactions. Grade: C

The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography (2016)

Errol Morris is the best living documentary filmmaker, full stop, and The B-Side is quietly one of his very best. It's ostensibly a career retrospective of the renowned Polaroid portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, and the film works perfectly well on that, chronically Dorfman's memories of photography all the way back to her childhood and all the way up to her 2016 retirement via Morris's typical "just let 'em talk" approach to his documentary subjects. But as Dorfman's observations accumulate, the movie deepens progressively until, in its final minutes, we're presented with a treatise on the ramifications of modern business infrastructure, the impact of the loss of physical media, and even mortality itself. It's that typical Morris trick, using oral recollection to imbue a seemingly straightforward premise with profound philosophical depth, and it's as effective as ever here. Grade: A

A Single Man (2009)

You can gussy up a mannequin with all the pretty clothes you want, but in the end, it'll still be plastic. A lifeless movie that I was so bored with that I couldn't even muster up the outrage to care about the utterly ridiculous ending. Grade: C-

RockNRolla (2008)

Douchebags, The Movie. The credits promise the cast's return in a sequel, but who cares? I certainly wouldn't want to spend another minute with these characters and their casual homophobia and glamorous disregard for pretty much every single good thing in the world. I suppose after Snatch, two Sherlock Holmes movies, and this, it's time for me to admit that I just don't like Guy Ritchie movies. Grade: D+

Come and See (Иди и смотри) (1985)

I've often said that part of the genius of Full Metal Jacket was the way it twisted war movie tropes into full-on horror movie tropes, but here comes this Russian masterpiece and doubles down on the whole enterprise two years prior to the Kubrick film. Come and See teeters on the razor's edge between hyperrealism and full-blown experimentalism, as its horrifically unblinking stare at the surreal atrocities of the Nazi occupation of Russia is scored by a shrieking cacophony of war machine noises, Mozart compositions, and actual human screams. It's an effect that, after 2.5 hours, might feel numbing if it weren't so morally impassioned. "This is war; nobody is to blame," a Nazi says near the film's end, and the movie is so crystal-clear in rebuking that claim that it's almost cathartic. Of course someone is to blame. But as a famous sequence very near the film's end asserts breathtakingly, there's no real catharsis in recognizing the face of evil; there is only terror. Grade: A

Music

White Stag - Emergence (2017)
The most interesting band in Knoxville's progressive rock scene continues to push the boundaries of its sound. Incorporating flute and saxophone along with the typical death metal, drone, and avant-garde textures, Emergence recalls, more than any of White Stag's previous releases, the canonized sounds of progressive rock's early-'70s golden age, specifically evoking Jethro Tull and King Crimson. That's not to say this is a nostalgic or throwback record in the neo-prog vein—in fact, this, their first full-length album, is as "out there" as the band has ever been. It's not all great; for as exploratory as they all are, a sameness creeps up on the album in its latter tracks, and the songwriting clearly takes a backseat to the atmospherics. Still, White Stag shows tremendous ingenuity, too, and with a debut this strong, I look forward to the ways the band will expand and innovate in the future. Grade: B+