250 favorite albums, 2010-19

It's exam week, so you're getting a listdump

This is a year and a third late because I wanted to get to everything. And of course I didn’t because it’s impossible, but I’d put my efforts at getting to everything that seemed like a plausible candidate up against anybody’s. The main lacuna is in jazz, as well as classical and electronic, and to a lesser extent mixtapes and metal, but mostly jazz—the sheer quantity of good jazz is overwhelming to anyone who doesn’t make it their thing, and the line between good jazz and great jazz is fine. I’m also sure I missed some stuff from outside the Anglosphere, and I don’t have a consistent policy on compilations and reissues, or on cancelled people (though generally work prior to cancellation remained eligible.)

Anyway, a list of 250 albums—approximately the number from this era I expect to keep playing regularly for the rest of my life, and large enough to be an accurate representation of my taste—is a paltry writing return for ten thousand hours of listening. I’ve blogged about most of these somewhere or other, so over the next couple of years I intend to copy-paste in reviews of all of these. Bookmark the webpage (not the email) if you’re interested, or just wait for me to tell you when I’m done.

The top 50 is pretty stable to within a place or two; figure a margin of error of about 15 spots otherwise.

1. Tune-Yards: Whokill (2011)

2. Robyn: Body Talk (2010)

3. Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are (2015)

4. Miranda Lambert: Platinum (2014)

5. Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Jama Ko (2013)

6. Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis (2019)

   This grab-bag of jazz, blues, spirituals, and jaw-harpery, more Charles Ives than Harry Smith, surpasses Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile, her previous high-water mark. There’s a long tradition of black metropolitanism with Langston Hughes at or near the wellspring that attempts to recombine shards from a less urban, more Southern black history into a coherent experience—necessarily always with an acknowledgement of suffering, but one suffused with joy and freedom and with the contradictions inherent in a phrase like “Emma Jean’s white play cousin.” What sets Roberts apart, in addition to the highness of her modernism and her total respect for her sources, is her omnivorousness. As her series has wound its way nonlinearly and non-chronologically upriver, it’s accumulated additional modes and flavors: here, jug bands and barn dancers join her ever-growing second line. Whether reclaiming a shanty that drifted from the cotton fields to the Atlantic or constructing spaces for her sax or guests like Steve Swell to permeate, her purpose is always clear and her band recognizes her urgency. While she’s more than adequate as a singer, it’s her rapid yet laconic delivery of spoken words that most forcefully express that one person’s history is another’s memory, that the past isn’t even past. Roll the old chariot along.

7. Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)

8. Miles Davis: Live in Europe 1967 (2011)

9. Inter Arma: Paradise Gallows (2016)

   Still not sure what “post-metal” means other than getting a good Pitchfork score and knowing who Rilke is, but this seems pretty post-, allowing a variety of alloys, all heavy. Yet the acoustics are better than you’d expect from within the belly of the beast. Their basic trick is to make every chord beyond the first feel like a bolt from heaven/eruption from hell, capable of initiating/extinguishing life in the primordial soup. To pull this off requires rendering minutes of droning stasis tolerable, which they achieve through buzzing tones and making the notes bend just right. The overall feeling is of inevitability — of death, of course, but death as just one form of motion, as if passing into the afterlife were like sailing up the Potomac on a breezy day, with a piano to play you out.

10. Wussy: Attica! (2014)

11. Chris Lightcap’s Bigmouth: Epicenter (2015)

12. Alisa Weilerstein/Daniel Barenboim: Elgar & Carter Cello Concertos (2012)

13. Alex Lahey: I Love You Like a Brother (2017)

    At 25, she’s mastered time-tested ways to catch the ear: major key hooks, clean guitar leads, fast strumming. The slightly bruised enthusiasm of her singing befits her dissections of her It’s-Complicateds with romantic conspirators of unstated gender (although “we can’t marry if we want to” would’ve been a tell until December 2017) and their effects on her psyche and physiology. What’s novel is her drollness about these topics: a title like “Perth Traumatic Stress Disorder” inevitably recalls fellow cheap-living Melburnian Courtney Barnett. But where Barnett presents as a guitarist-slinging oddball, Lahey seems like a fairly normal Australian with fairly normal concerns (her weight, her drinking) who just happens to be exceptionally good at imbuing songs with the heart that young wits often downplay. What kind of artist makes the most effervescent song on their debut about their brother? Someone bloody sensible, that’s who.

14. Rilo Kiley: Rkives (2013)

15. Tom Zé: Vira Lata Na Via Láctea (2014)

16. William Parker: I Plan to Stay a Believer (2010)

17. Karantamba: Ndigal (2012)

18. Billy Woods & Kenny Segal: Hiding Places (2019)

    Key among the many lit, rap, and masscult canon callbacks on “Checkpoints” is the evocation of Things Fall Apart, which acts as both a claim (like Achebe’s) to the modernist tradition and a declaration of solidarity. Unwilling to use his breadth of knowledge to become anything resembling Nas at Carnegie Hall, frequently pixelated Billy Woods (of the duo Armand Hammer, whose Paraffin I failed to convince anyone to listen to last year) uses his allusions to Dickens and Naipaul and Fred Sanford to show temporal and geographic continuities in the difficulties the societally marginal have in participating in culture, whether that means not having quarters for video games or having your health insurer tell you hell no. With casual racism and lurking cops threatening harassment or much worse, one has to do all one can to hold on to their humanity, even if that means associating with people who are losing theirs. More so than his perennially honorably mentionable buddies A. Rock and H. Sandman, Woods declines to get caught up in his own dexterity. He racks up his ultra-combo rhyme strings one hit at a time, as if it’s his meanings that matter — he makes them as transparent as possible, and no more. Producer Segal finds noises that correlate with the disorientation of a world where you’re never sure if you’re going to get your mail unless it’s bad news, his beats sounding like they’re coming from depressed ambulance radios in stop-start traffic, Dopplering in and out of tune. The result is the masterpiece of urban alienation alt-rap has been promising since De La Soul was dead. Only death is too easy. As Woods says of Okonkwo: “N — just quit.”

19. Parquet Courts: Wide Awake! (2018)

    I’ve never noticed Sean Yeaton on bass before (had to look up his name, in fact) — did he win an auction for Bootsy Collins’ hat, or did Danger Mouse just give him permission to go ham? More than buying a keyboard, his funk bounces and rock vibrations, along with Max Savage’s groove-directing snare (which I have noticed before), are the primary reasons this is their strongest album, all but clinching their Band of the Decade title. A. Savage and A. Brown continue to be better at balancing dueling visions than any pair since peak Wussy (Ezra and Rostam tell me they’re 94.5% through writing a statement disputing this), with Andrew always ready with a jagged interjection when Austin gets too bummer-dreamy and Austin always ready with a bummer dream when Andrew’s been hanging out with his BFA friends for too long. They’re collectively mad at the poverty-stricken, environmentally wrecked big picture and, since they’re millennials no matter how many social media accounts they don’t have, at microaggressions, even as they realize that dicks yelling for “Freebird” aren’t the worst hardship they or other 21st century humans have to face. Hope may be too audacious to wholly invest in (on the song Brown claims is his optimistic one, he sings “Spend all your money at the casket store”), but the same goes for nihilism. Instead, they take satisfaction in the sense that no one knows anything: hey, for all you know, a change could come. Until it does, angry dancing is still dancing.

20. The Ex: 27 Passports (2018)

    Have I been ignoring the sharpest rock band in Europe for 38 years? Chugging intensity that puts younger pretenders to shame, incisive licks that point you in the right direction without wasting your time or theirs, two singers who make excitable disdain seem as cool as it was in 1980 (maybe it helps that neither was in the band in 1980.) And the lyrics! They’re informed by decades of study of urban capitalism and its casualties, jump-cutting from 17th century tulip mania to contemporary bullshit jobs. They explore a European Union where the Troika’s repeated attempts to flatten the continent haven’t abolished geography: the roundabouts may be the same but the car crashes retain national character. Autoerotic.

21. Maren Morris: Hero (2016)

22. Tegan and Sara: Heartthrob (2013)

23. Jens Lekman: I Know What Love Isn’t (2012)

24. D.O. Misiani & Shirati Jazz: The King of History (2010)

25. Brandy Clark: 12 Stories (2013)

26. Steve Lehman Trio: Dialect Fluorescent (2012)

27. Kevin Abstract: American Boyfriend (2015)

    This twenty-year-old digital media artist (he owns a decent camera) has made a Gus Van Sant movie — one of the good ones, think way back — with awkward outsiders and beautiful insiders wandering around doing awkward beautiful dumb kid things. The beauty doesn’t imply life is tolerable, but it helps. He makes no Swiftian claim to everyteendom — when you’re seventeen and somebody tells you they love you, who the fuck knows what you’ll think as you’re making out in the bleachers? The pegacorn sometimes known as Ian Simpson (he hates the last name) achieves the self-loathing bliss it took Prince Be four albums to achieve. His ennui-swamped adolescence is an age of receptivity to all music: after years of AAA car radio, your guitar hero might be the guy from the Cranberries and you might have accrued a decade-spanning mental library of echoing drums with which to dramatize your angst and fluctuating hormones.

    Of his wacky voices (de rigeur for someone whose teens were the Ocean/Lamar era,) the funniest is his petulant off-key falsetto to ironize that he couldn’t bear the conditional “If you really love me” to be unfulfilled. He’s also wry enough to follow “I don’t believe in nothing” with an exclaimed “Jesus Christ!” I hesitate to drop the I-word, but he’s intersectional, getting into how his character’s collection of racial and sexual hats affects life in his particular conflation of Texas and L.A. The fuck-you ending is wishful, but that doesn’t undo the work done to interrogate what can bring together casual racists and homophobes with the subjects of their hate. The answer? Young Thug. Which is a recognition of the limits of unity, and a very good pick if Obama is off the board.

28. Pistol Annies: Hell on Heels (2011)

29. Loudon Wainwright III: Older Than My Old Man Now (2012)

30. Batsumi (2011)

31. James Brandon Lewis: An UnRuly Manifesto (2019)

    He was never a replicant, but this Haden/Ornette tribute is a huge step forward in his ability to express expansive emotion. He plays long, substantive solos that retain shape and funk throughout; it helps that his rhythm section (Luke Stewart and Warren Trae Crudup III) feels like his rhythm section, much more so than on No Filter. Jamie Branch and Anthony Pirog are able to provide more than enough krazee noises for JBL to focus on blowing thick, especially on “The Eleventh Hour”, on which Branch plays rough and Lewis smooth, while Pirog selflessly repeats the figure that holds the track together. In the special case of “Haden Is Beauty,” all players recognize a hell of tune when they have one, and are happy to support it. Also, there’s no rapping. Easily his best, and one of the year’s.

32. The Paranoid Style: Rolling Disclosure (2016)

33. Group Doueh & Cheveu: Dakhla Sahara Session (2017)

    That I didn’t hear about this until 2021 is something of an indictment of the English-language world music press, of which I guess I’m now a part, so mea culpa. I suspect the reason Anglophones initially ignored it was Cheveu, a rock band—a French rock band—a French synth rock band that got reviewed in Pitchfork a few times, most recently earning a 6.6 for Bum, their album preceding this. So it’s fusion, and of the most serendipitous kind, with plenty of common ground—Group Doueh being a synth rock band that got reviewed in Pitchfork themselves (7.6 for Zayna Jumma, which needless to say was too low.) This is closest-but-not-that-close in feel to Amadou & Mariam’s dalliances with fancy production and Manu Chao, but more of a genuine collaboration, and better. Crucially, both bands are willing to learn from each other, with Cheveu behaving judiciously on the more Saharawi tracks, like on “Charâa”, where faced with a foreign scale in 6/8, they successfully keep up with Doueh’s acceleration until both parties take a breath and reincarnate the song as a multinational chanson. In return, Group Doueh now know what garage punk is, if that wasn’t already a thing in the Western Sahara. 

34. Taylor Swift: Red (2012)

35. Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What (2011)

36. Jamila Woods: Heavn (2016)

    Woods reclaims loneliness like she’s Wordsworth, only solace in nature would’ve been hard for Wordsworth to find if he were wandering Lake Shore Drive, regardless of the water temperature in Lake Michigan. That Woods instead finds her daffodils in “Just Like Heaven” and the Dawson’s Creek theme demonstrates she’s from more privilege than, say, guest and 2017 breakout star we hope Noname. Who knows whether she learned Rockin’ Robin in the playground or she studied it at Brown, but either way her solidarity with the vry blk runs deep, and she’s determined to use her degree to keep her people warm. When she cites Audre, Angela, Sojourner, and Assata, she seems to draw from the very femininity of the names, so it’s no surprise that with just the right amount of early-Holiday-via-Badu head voice insouciance she insists on her own long “i.” Yet since she doesn’t want next week to remake last century, she has to get out of the house eventually to organize, whether that means going to her nonprofit day job or getting a dense verse out of Chance, who while hardly boasting when he claims the title of “number one most gentrified” for Chicago, reveals a side of the city you don’t get in no Vice doc. To be social risks loss, with cancer causing more bereavements than gun violence — in this context, self-care is an act of resistance. Collective self-care is revolutionary.

37. Frank Ocean: Nostalgia, Ultra (2011)

38. Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think (2015)

39. The Original Sound of Mali (2017)

    Perhaps the best introduction to Mali’s music yet: at the least, it would form a killer tandem with 2014’s desert blues-focused Rough Guide. This trends older, with the stuff you might have heard before — most likely the Ambassadeurs material — is well-chosen and well-balanced: “Mandjou” is the only Salif Keita track. The stuff I hadn’t heard before, I wondered why I hadn’t. I should have got around to Zani Diabaté and the Super Djata Band’s “Fadingna Kouma” (being eight when their self-titled album came out in the U.S. is no excuse,) but the even better “Worodara,” which precedes it here, seems to have been unknown to the Internet until now. And how come I’d never deduced the existence of Irdissa Soumaoro’s organ-drenched post-Ambassadeurs work, and what else has he done? (French Wikipedia: inspired by Amadou and Mariam, he got a degree in teaching music to the blind.) At this hit rate I might prefer another ten volumes of Mali rather than ten other West African nations getting their moments. Or both, both would work.

40. Harriet Tubman: Araminta (2017)

    Amazing what befriending a genius (two if you count Greg Tate waxing polysyllabic on the liner notes) can do for your music. Wadada Leo Smith is piercing on “Ne Ander” and judicious and piercing on “Blacktal Fractal,” and the Tubman trio plays up to his level, sometimes playing off Smith’s ideas with Brandon Ross guitar tones that could make sensitive ears bleed, sometimes taking sounds that seem accidental and emphatically repeating them to rupture sensitive brains. The groove is as heavy as that of the doomjazz outfits that proliferated fifteen years after this group first plugged in their fuzz pedals, yet bassist Melvin Gibbs and drummer J.T. Ross are capable of rolling with the leads’ fancies like they’re playing instruments of vibranium. In any case, one of the most satisfying rock-jazz alloys of the decade.

41. Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show (2015)

42. Waxahatchee: Out in the Storm (2017)

    Ever the formalist, Katie Crutchfield makes sure every line has a real melody, and she strums more expressively than just about anyone in indie bothers to these days. But this is the first time I’ve been convinced by her for a whole album, maybe including P.S. Eliot, and yeah it does mostly seem to come down to using more direct language (though there’s still a “behind sycophantic amends” here and there.) I’m not convinced it was entirely her ex’s fault and that her only mistake was putting up with his shit for so long, but that matters as little as it does for T. Swift. What does matter is that she’s subjectively better off without him and capable of expressing it. Twin Allison provides crucial support as an instrumentalist, a character, and a sister.

43. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City (2013)

44. Rudresh Mahathappa & Steve Lehman: Dual Identity (2010)

45. DJ Metatron: This Is Not (2015)

46. Sunny Sweeney: Trophy (2017)

    After the accomplished Concrete and ballsy Provoked, this is deeper again, and one has to credit the Lori McKenna co-writes for their mises-en-scene (the other-woman setup of “Trophy” is a delicious complement to the great “From a Table Away”), not to mention rhymes for Texas George Strait couldn’t fit under his cowboy hat. But while she nods to one-stoplight towns, the key “Bottle by My Bed” is set in the suburbs where most modern country listeners live (because that’s where most Americans live.) While that one harbors hope, the closer is about the irreversible loss of a friend to suicide, and if someone suffering in a three-bedroom house doesn’t deserve more empathy than anyone else in pain, they scarcely deserve less. Even on the straightforward dirge “Pills”, Sweeney, with a voice of middle magnitude, keeps scratching away at her character and her relationship with the pill-taker to reveal her culpability and the thin differences in habits separating them. In short, singing smart matters, and it’s what’s made her country’s most consistent artist. P.S.: I bet she plays Chuck Berry more than she lets on.

47. Octo Octa: Resonant Body (2019)

    The best house-and-breaks album I’ve heard in years. Historians will have fun IDing where each sound on the retro tracks is borrowed from; the rest of us will assume they would’ve gone over just as well in illegally appropriated early-’90s warehouses as they do now. Maya Bouldry-Morrison pushes things further, like with the tempo changes on “Spin Girl, Let’s Activate!”, often enough that there’s no hint of staleness or gathering moss. Knowing where to place a sample to subtly shift the mood is a fading art in this age of EDM (let alone rap), and she shows the knack, as with the post-verbal vocal on “Deep Connection” that may or may not be saying “now” adding urgency to ambient chords. “Ecstatic Beat” is the masterpiece, more than holding up against Goldie and Alex Reese classics: four and a half minutes of rock-hard sounds that nevertheless don’t hurry and maintain form, so that even people who don’t use performance-enhancing chemicals can dance along.

48. Park Jiha: Communion (2016)

    Shameless in her pursuit of beauty whether the mood is melancholy or tempestuous, Park plays old school Korean instruments over a featherbed of vibes and sparse percussion. On the oboe-like piri, she can honk Murray-like, always with a return to a simple snatch of melody in mind. On the yanggeum (hammered dulcimer), she approaches Western minimalism a la Semipop Life fave Nik Bärtsch, with multiple pulses passing through the compositions, sometimes hyped up by Kim Oki’s bass clarinet and sometimes laid bare. Throughout, her sense of melody is impeccable, with her tunes playing out gradually and logically so you can appreciate every tone outside of the brief spells of din. And when it’s time to squeal, it feels good, like relieving a headache. Props to Glitterbeat for bringing to an international audience the most unexpectedly gorgeous album since I chickened out of top tenning Quraishi’s Mountain Melodies a few years ago.

49. Dylan Hicks Sings Bolling Greene (2012)

50. Carsie Blanton: Buck Up (2019)

    Oh great, another political singer-songwriter, right? And it’s only a slight ideological reassurance that before her seventhish album, she was most known for a Tumblr post on “casual love,” in which she updated Arthur Lee’s “I could be in love with almost everyone,” rendered hopelessly naive upon Nixon’s election, with an assertion that one could love-not-sex (not that there’s anything etc.) multiply and joyfully if the stakes were lowered. Which is true! And still hard! But she makes her radicalism (“you’re just a Democrat, I’m a revolutionary”) so bloody reasonable that it resonates even with a milquetoast succdem (who admittedly wants a wealth tax to happen) like me. If her foregrounded desires catch attention, the arrangements, which swing easy even when they aren’t ripping off “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” should keep you around. And having had an even worse late 2016 than most of us, her response — doubling down on becoming John Prine, but with Marxism — isn’t exactly what I would’ve done, given her wit and talents, it seems, again, reasonable.

51. M.I.A.: Matangi (2013)

52. Meta Meta: Metal Metal (2012)

    It can be hard for non-Portuguese speakers to distinguish a good weird Brazilian album from a really good weird Brazilian album, but this, unlike its “good, but…” 2016 follow-up MM3, is clearly the latter. The supergroup (Duo Moviola fans are reeling) gets better the longer the songs go: once an Afro-Brazilian rhythm locks in, all parties but especially Thiago França’s sax benefit from the additional room to explore dynamics and funny noises. Yet each of the sprints, too, succeeds, quickly setting up an off-center groove that some subset of the principals prods it while bassist Marcelo Cabral and various percussionist cronies prevent it from tipping over. The mid-length ones are just good tunes, featuring Juçara Marçal singing about crooked snakes with a straight face. Reissue bonus: unlike on so many non-Nigerian records with Tony Allen guest spots, here the great drummer sounds like one.

53. Rae Sremmurd: SremmLife 2 (2016)

54. The Rough Guide to the Music of Mali (2014)

55. Idles: Joy as an Act of Resistance (2018)

    More obviously human than Brutalism, at least if you take as default that artists (like, press-your-mum’s-ashes-into-the-vinyl artists) aren’t self-evidently human. Joe Talbot’s yawping always had an anxiety about it, but that was previously subsumed into stock poses. This time, ironically, there’s less joy and a narrower resistance, as pain brought on by personal tragedy (“Baby shoes for sale: never worn” is delivered absolutely straight) can’t be dissipated but can be channeled into verbal jabs at Brexiteers or playing the Dozens with large violent toffs. But his mask of masculinity is as for-show as, to use one of his charmingly dated pop culture references, Stone Cold Steve Austin’s. What ties the album together is a love — for his partner, for Danny Nedelko — so clearly radical that even those in the habit for mistaking love for weakness couldn’t make that mistake here. The rest of the band got better too.

56. Sunmi: Warning EP (2018)

    The five-track Western edition of this is one more not-quite-enough EP in a year of them, but this is easily fixed by dropping “Gashina” and “Heroine” in their rightful fifth and sixth slots. Thus supplemented, this is nineteen hard-beated minutes from a former girl group member who took time off to go to college and returned with an attitude and songwriting chops that evoke actual human relationships. The synths are a lot less lazy than the K-pop norm and the soprano sax comp on “Black Pearl” would make Kenny G tip his hair. With “Gashina” received like she’d declared “it’s Sunmi, bitch,” Sunmi has a edge to her persona not previously found in all-kill level stars, and she barely slows down for the pretty ones until the closing fragment. Inspirational English lyric: “Get away out of my face.”

57. Tal National: Tantabara (2018)

    Niger’s finest are just as exciting as they were on their two previous albums, with a bit more assurance and studio polish. Cramming in more triplets than a Migos mixtape, four drummers hardly seem like enough; it’s a wonder they don’t literally burn through them, Spinal Tap-style. The singers are the principal source of variety (even the guy who shouts “Zama” again and again) and collectively do a pretty good job at stamping their individuality over the blazing, shifting rhythms. Guitarist Almeida is the ringmaster, constructing circular riffs that the band could play around ad infinitum if they were on what all the Afrobeat guys are on, only here the groove’s orbit will often shift to a different center with no loss of momentum, like the band’s solved the three-body problem. Enjoy their stable era while it lasts.

58. St. Vincent: Masseduction (2017)

    When Christgau wrote that “the smaller number who identify with her are deluding themselves — she’s a genius and they’re not, and she’s proud of it,” calling her a genius was only the fourth most weird thing about that sentence. That identification is a prerequisite for a deep connection to music can be disproved by listening to a Franco album or to Jack Antonoff’s noise-hooks here. That one can only identify with doppelgängers is not an idea worthy of the pluralists in New York or Los Angeles. And that having a different talent level might be the biggest barrier to identifying with someone who literally dates supermodels is cray-cray. This sex, drugs, and celebrity focus hasn’t resulted in widespread loss of cachet, a sign of social progress that backing vocalist Jenny Lewis must wish came ten years earlier. Moralists are undoubtedly assuaged by her nominal regret at having too much fun (Los Ageless! It’s kind of fake!) But her newfound commitment to seduction means she makes damn sure even the ballads are expressive enough to stick.

59. Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)

60. The Group: Live (2012)

61. Rachid Taha: Je suis africain (2019)

    He never stopped growing, never stopped looking for new sounds, new people, new languages. So “Insomnia”, for instance, has spaghetti Western whistling over its Algerian tango; elsewhere there’s all of Africa, defined broadly enough to include both Jimi Hendrix and Jacques Derrida (I know who I’d rather do philosophy with.) Always fond of odd juxtapositions, here he puts up Andy Warhol against “Andy Waloo” (“I have nothing”), a pun he handed to his pop art buddy Hassan Hajjaj decades ago. “Aïta” is even more explicitly political, capturing the desperation of refugees and sharing in their exhaustion while sounding like there was no shortage of life left in him. But since this is art, he can leave us with a happy ending. And he’s earned it if anyone has, so why not?

62. Oddisee: Alwasta EP (2016)

    “These are good days for bad people,” begins rapper-producer Amir Mohamed, who grew up in the D.C. metro, spending his summers in his Sudanese-born dad’s homeland, before moving to Brooklyn with all the other single-origin coffee fans. He got more attention last year for a solid-ish instrumental album than for this EP from last spring on which he was motivated pretty directly by Trump to lift his game. The opening track continues with a history of pre-modern Britain, in which the Anglo-Saxon melting pot triumphs until a Randy Newman punchline. “Lifting Shadows” starts out describing how fraught dealing international travel was for him long before the latest executive order, before making both the emotive and the economic case for refugees better than any 2016 Presidential candidate. On his new album, The Iceberg, he claims “I’m from black America, this is just another year.” He’s half-right.

63. Cardi B: Invasion of Privacy (2018)

    Better than early adopters who noted her evident proficiency at libertarian capitalism could’ve reasonably expected. She might be the least technically skilled MC on her record, but you could say the same about College Dropout Kanye, and he turned out… well, never mind, but like him she compensates with swagger and jokes to groan at. Hyper-aware of rap’s historic and not-so-historic tendencies to restrict agency to cishet men, she fucks these up by ripping the diamond-studded B off her chest a la Letterman (you know, the Electric Company) and claiming her share of the tradition. (Do “To Bimp a Butterfly” next.) It remains to be seen whether her Bronx around-the-wayness will survive Maybach money; identifying with bosses over workers isn’t promising. For now, she’s a goddamned rock-and-roll star; that is, she’s both.

64. Grenier Meets Archie Pelago (2014)

65. Murray, Allen & Carrington: Perfection (2016)

66. Tim Berne’s Snakeoil: Shadow Man (2013)

    I never bothered with one of 2013’s most acclaimed jazz albums at the time because ECM, but happily Berne was able to record this while Manfred was out lamenting the decline of Western Civ with Godard or something. An airy, perfectly okay Paul Motian cover notwithstanding, the result might be the decade’s deepest (mostly) acoustic quartet record, thanks as much to pianist Matt Mitchell’s creativity as Berne’s. The shorter pieces “Son of Not So Sure” and “Static” set out the poles: the sparse former directed by Mitchell’s and drummer Ches Smith’s percussive textures, the dense latter built around Berne’s and clarinetist Oscar Noriega’s twisted melodies. In the three sixteen-to-twenty-three minute pieces, regardless of who makes the initial statement, Berne and Noriega make the harmonic and melodic structure(s) apparent, and then Mitchell gets to decorate or show off, depending on mood, while Smith shadows him, once with vibes. Full of ideas (not unusual for jazz), well-organized (which is.)

67. Tabu Ley Rochereau: The Voice of Lightness Vol. 2 (2010)

68. Roswell Rudd: Trombone for Lovers (2013)

69. Billie Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019)

    In May I was put off by the title as much as anything (that ungainly “all”), but now that I’ve resigned myself to having to take the goth kids seriously again, I find lots to love. Goth kids have long been responsible for a big chunk of formal innovation in pop — who knows whether the structure of “Bad Guy” can be reduced to a formula, though there’ll be a lot of attempts, most of them bad. Eilish creates a club-and-chill record while managing to avoid the tedium of actually having to go to the club by getting famous young and without really being inwardly chill about anything. Some lyrics are dumb and some are very funny, especially “Xanny.” Kids, you don’t need drugs to get all fuzzy if your brother has the right vocal filters!

70. Tee Grizzley: My Moment (2017)

    Broke Michigan State accounting student starts stealing computers from dorm rooms, which led to going on the lam to Lexington, an attempted robbery of a jewelry store that ended with him surrendering to the gun-toting manager, a variety of correctional facilities, and 39 million YouTube views for “First Day Out.” With clarity at as low an ebb in music as in the White House, Grizzley’s classicism invigorates — few contemporary rappers could pull off both an a cappella opener and tell a story as vividly as he opens “Secrets,” at least he has to withhold the incriminating details. But it’s how he gets excited — about luxury watches he failed to steal, sure, but he understands you might prefer sex and might help you out if it doesn’t break things with your main guy — that makes him the most exciting street rapper to come up since 2013 Kevin Gates. He should be smart enough to realize that when you’re excellent at music and terrible at crime, your career choice should be straightforward.

71. Guiss Guiss Bou Bess: Set Sela (2019)

    Though I’ve recently hit middle age, meaning that the only thing stopping me from constantly posting that music was better in my day is that my day was the late ’90s, I’m glad to report I can still be heartened by something that sounds genuinely new. This Senegalese-based group builds their sound around sabar drumming with chanted vocals and electronic crayoning that for the first time in Afropop, as far as I know, pushes beyond Congotronics. Crucially, Grenoblois bleeps guy Stéphane Costantini used to be a percussion guy, so he and bandleader Mara Seck are simpatico, with the electroclaps and the hand-and-stick drumming distinct from each other, but mutually reinforcing. Snatches of West African guitar and swathes of synths energize the rhythms as much as their dance crew must do their live performances. Hopefully their plan to take over the festival world this year is only delayed.

72. Beyoncé: Lemonade (2016)

73. William Parker: Wood Flute Songs (2013)

74. Danny Brown: XXX (2011)

75. John Grant: Pale Green Ghosts (2013)

76. No Age: Everything in Between (2010)

77. Terakaft: Alone (Tenere) (2015)

78. Kwi Bamba & l’Orchestre de Gama Berema (2018)

    A well-funded star during Guinea’s socialist era, Bamba took a young band and some old Soviet amps out to the forest for one 1997 take, but this sounds much more old school than that. This is less overwhelming than the continental norm Afropop was converging to at the time — the guitars leave space around the notes of their strummed rhythms, making it easy to enjoy the rustic rhythms without having to bone up on your Guerzé and Kpellé traditions. On sax with homemade reeds, Bamba could honk as well as play long, fluid notes and lines. The singers bring a laid-back vibe, as if late at a party after the loudest people have already left to do loud things elsewhere. Now the real fun begins.

79. Kalie Shorr: Open Book (2019)

    She sounds almost exactly like twang-era Taylor Swift, down to the conversational phrasing and the unspontaneous spots of melisma. No doubt this is in part due to her manager, one Todd Cassetty, who having supped from the circa-2010 Swift revenue stream, provides funding for session musicians just a little short of the best money can buy. But surely it’s also due to a twentysomething singer being a teen when Fearless and Speak Now and Red came out and realizing one road out of Portland, ME for an aspiring songwriter ran through Nashville, even if she was more into her older siblings’ Alanis records at the time. Her attention to craft can be heard in the extra bounce in her pre-choruses and the fact that her bridges exist. Only since she didn’t grow up stupidly rich, she writes about real shit. She’s had her share of pain and loss—a sister who OD’d is directly referenced on the album’s two great tracks and haunts the rest. She gets still more idiosyncratic on “Gatsby”, in which she maintains a toxic lifestyle because would you rather be alone with your thoughts? I don’t know about you, but that feels like 22. (The Unabridged reissue adds four good new songs, which is probably worth the thematic dilution.)

80. Young Thug & Bloody Jay: Black Portland (2014)

81. Miguel: Kaleidoscope Dream (2012)

82. Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love (2010)

83. Oneohtrix Point Never: Garden of Delete (2015)

84. Danny Brown: Atrocity Exhibition (2016)

85. James McMurtry: Complicated Game (2015)

86. Pet Shop Boys: Electric (2013)

87. Ben Allison: Union Square (2012)

88. Abdullah Ibrahim: Sotho Blue (2011)

89. Control Top: Covert Contracts (2019)

    The best punk-not-artpunk band whose members all have the same name (“Al” or thereabouts) in a few years. Not that they don’t have art — they have too many polysyllabic rhymes to feign naivety — but dialectics are secondary to yelling “Eat shit!” at one’s bullshit job, which is as it should be. Though their yearning for liberation from techno-capitalism is commonplace among millennials and post-millennials, they have an unusual ability to evoke a sense of being pinned down by rapid Type A douche fire before the catharsis. Al-He manufactures a dense and wild guitar sound, Al-She might be madder on bass than on vocals, and Al-They isn’t going to let them sneak in a slow one.

90. Sonny Rollins: Road Shows Vol. 2 (2011)

91. The Necks: Body (2018)

    I’ve heard zero of this Australian trio’s 19 previous albums, so I’ll only compare this quantitatively: one 56-minute track, here in four movements following a classical exposition-build-peak-resolution narrative structure, isn’t out of their ordinary. I don’t know if hammering out one chord — or even one ominous tone, ringing like the Undertaker is entering over and over — for ten-fifteen minutes is also typical for them, but Cale and Steve Reich would be impressed at how much they get out of it, the guitar tiptoeing across its small permissible scope of expression without distracting from the primacy of the groove. When it’s time to chill out a bit, Tony Buck puts his guitar down (figuratively, since they aren’t too pure to overdub) and dazzles with a vast range of percussive tinkles and diminuendos. As stellar as any Sonic Youth album in a decade.

92. Lady Gaga: Born This Way (2011)

93. DJ Koze: Amygdala (2013)

94. Luke James (2014)

95. Steve Lehman Trio & Craig Taborn: The People I Love (2019)

    A valiant last ditch effort by Lehman to grab jazz artist of the decade, though William Parker probably still takes it on quantity. Lehman takes a wide range of harmonic material (including, really, Autechre) and dices it, his fast runs neatly slicing through the tunes in ways that still allow you to observe the original structures, like he’s an infomercial knife salesman. The rhythm section revs along sweetly, with drummer Damion Reid relishing the chance to full-contact spar with Lehman on “A Shifting Design.” The short improvised interludes, in which Taborn gently suggests he can express a lot with twelve tones no matter how many Lehman uses, whet the appetite for more. That this might not be one of my top couple of 2019 jazz albums means it’s been a good year.

96. Fiona Apple: The Idler Wheel (2012)

97. Golem: Tanz (2014)

98. Home Brew (2012)

99. Killer Mike: R.A.P. Music (2012)

100. Kate & Anna McGarrigle: Tell My Sister (2011)

101. Downtown Boys: Full Communism (2015)

102. Duduvudu: The Gospel According to Dudu Pukwana (2014)

103. The Rough Guide to Highlife (2012)

104. Saba: Care for Me (2018)

     For anyone who admires the Chicago School of Rap’s intimacy, warmth, and sense of history while noting they sometimes get so self-involved you marvel they don’t all put three I’s in their titles, here’s an album a from friend and guest of Chance/Noname/Purp etc. who at least claims “I don’t tell the truth so y’all will feel sorry for me.” The acid rap trumpet and violin are well-integrated, never distracting from the primacy of Saba’s storytelling, which can be impassioned or matter-of-fact as the material demands. The narrative centres around his cousin John Walt, admired and seemingly invincible until he was stabbed to death after a fight over a coat. On “Prom/King”, the year’s most heartbreaking song, the prom half captures how the constant threat of violence is more exhausting than anything, then the king half turns into something much worse than exhaustion. Walt gets the last word: “I just hope I’ll make it ’til tomorrow.”

105. Das Racist: Relax (2011)

106. Baroness: Purple (2015)

107. Adam Lane: Ashcan Rantings (2010)

108. Bette Midler: It’s the Girls (2014)

     I didn’t prioritize this when it came out because the tracklist looked full of unstealables, and the opening “Be My Baby”/“One Fine Day” combo didn’t dispel this supposition, their fates determined by their iconic intros. But it soon becomes clear she doesn’t need to steal anything as a major investor in the Girl Group Mutual Fund. New contexts are enough: when she and Fund Manager Emeritus Darlene Love do “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” the “unemployment checks” line has accrued additional defiance after a half-century of attacks on welfare. Plus, in case you’d forgotten, she really is funny, turning the Marvelettes’ parable of piscine superabundance into something as winkingly vulgar as Tony Ferrino’s “Fishing for Girls,” with betting singing. And the ones that aren’t funny — “Waterfalls” and “Will You Still Me Tomorrow” — she doesn’t try to steal at all.

109. Jens Lekman: An Argument with Myself EP (2011)

110. Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile (2013)

111. Susanne Sundfør: Ten Love Songs (2015)

112. The Knife: Live at Terminal 5 (2017)

     You don’t have to watch the video all the way through, but an occasional glance helped take me through “Shaking The Habitual (whichI always liked) is belatedly making sense” to “maybe I don’t need Shaking The Habitual anymore.” The pose-dancing and everybody-clap moments underline that Karin and Olof Dreijer’s vision is collective yet coordinated — almost as if that’s the only way to change power relations! Moreover, much as I respect the integrity of their nineteen-minute drone thing, their schtick is a hell of a lot more fun with fan comprehension improved and with back catalog ringers. Even the poem is moderately devastating.

113. Kevin Gates: Stranger Than Fiction (2013)

114. Vic Mensa: The Autobiography (2017)

     In the tradition of K-Dot or maybe Weezer, Mensa uses label money (funding No I.D. here) to subsidize art therapy, working through his politics and his emo shit through his art with the help of literary tricks straight outta Iowa. The heart of this album begins with a death and its aftermath recounted by three narrators (one dead) like he’s Jenny Lewis. Following that is a comedy skit delivered so straight it’s dada, Chief Keef’s ignorance made more chilling than it’s been since 2012, a crooned reminiscence of under-requited love in which the autobiographer comes dangerously close to taking responsibility for his shitty relationships, Ph. and Sau. Williams, and a reprise with a bunch of metaphors and a 9mm in his mouth. That his material doesn’t always work on a line-by-line level only reinforces that a closer look isn’t always pretty.

115. Heems: Eat Pray Thug (2015)

116. Bhi Bhiman: Bhiman (2012)

117. Taylor Swift: 1989 (2014)

118. Tom Zé: Tropicalia Lixo Logico (2012)

119. Jeffrey Lewis & the Voltage: Bad Wiring (2019)

     Finally, he lives up to his intellectual potential by feinting toward meta while going autobiographical. In “My Girlfriend Doesn’t Worry”, he’s free to raise questions he can’t hope to answer; more often he pursues his niche interests, from cheap vinyl to Other People’s Pooches, guiltlessly. Yet content is only one reason this is his best album. The tracks here move with a higher average intensity than those of Manhattan, and his logorrheic vocals, always good for momentum, have a modulation to them that’s almost musical. Roger Moutenout’s production makes the high and low ends plenty tactile, and Mem Pahl and Brent Cole, called the Voltage this time, help out with classic ’90s-collegiate rhythms. Together they create a work of high craft and unfashionable integrity worthy of his ignored or fallen heroes. So awesome.

120. Willie Nelson: God’s Problem Child (2017)

     His best of the decade according to everyone more than a decade younger than him (this handily beats December Day for me) primarily because of, sorry, the lyrics — he has no shortage of not-quite-as-old wordslingers to provide him sage words about love and aging. His own material has a more puckish relationship with modernity (which for Willie includes the fast-forward button,) proving reports of his death to be #fakenews and declaring “the elections are over and nobody won,” which is about as sympathetic to his old boss Trump as any pro-immigration pothead is likely to, or should, manage. His lower register continues to accumulate a gravitas more tender than a gaggle of deep-voiced guests manage on the title track — the gentle bass notes he often ends phrases with suggest the Cohen estate should hire him to sing anything Lenny didn’t get around to recording properly, like You Want It Darker. Until then, he’ll sing Merle back home.

121. 2 Chainz: Pretty Girls Like Trap Music (2017)

     It’s one thing to let Nicki bend rhymes that would never occur to mere mortals, but here even Drake both out-brags and (gasp) out-raps his host. Yet TAFKA Tity Boi is at peace with his guests showing him up. His competence unquestioned, he’s as happy as any major-label rapper has been in years, enjoying yachts and Mike Will beats for their status value, yes, but also as pure consumption. All he has to do to keep the gravy Rolls Royce rolling is to keep expressing as clearly as possible how great this stuff is, no matter what tragedies may happen inside or outside of his bubble. Inspirational verse: “Fuck all that mumble shit.”

122. Bent Shapes: Wolves of Want (2016)

123. Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra: Time/Life (2016)

     Haden takes the first solo live in Antwerp, reminding us how eloquently an unadorned bass can speak by bending a few notes. Then it’s Carla Bley time, as her medium-r romantic compositions are load-bearing for flights of fancy, with alto Loren Stillman particularly ornate. Unsurprisingly the band is more magical with their late leader, but Bley runs a tight ship, allowing twelve or fourteen minutes of your time/life to breeze by. Haden is resurrected for the finale, his bass speaking whale, before drummer Matt Wilson imparts urgency to the ensemble. Haden’s record-closing English translation gives the reason: we might not have any longer than the whales do.

124. Quraishi: Mountain Melodies (2014)

125. Riton & Kah-Lo: Foreign Ororo (2018)

     The best Afrobeats-plural album to date isn’t even Afrobeats, except inasmuch as Afrobeats was pretty much house all along. Still, this sounds like Riton (aka “Henry Smithson”? Seriously?) listened to “212” and decided he wanted to do that without having to deal with, you know, Azealia. Enter Kah-Lo, whose studied flatness cools off the beats’ hyper edge. She doesn’t always have much to say, save that underage clubbing is fun and boys are of interest yet not worth making too much fuss about, but her held notes mean she’s more than a drum and the way she telegraphs playground chants makes her seem like someone to whom pleasure is facile. Frequent guest Mr Eazi, his visa status perhaps more contingent, provides ethics, though Kal-Lo takes a verse to reverse the Beatles’ journey from “Money” to “Can’t Buy Me Love.” But when Mr Eazi complains, justly, about trouble with USCIS, Kal-Lo rightly recall how Africans arriving in America centuries ago didn’t have it easy.

126. Reba McEntire: Stronger Than the Truth (2019)

     I’m not going to go through all thirty-three Reba albums to be sure this is her best, so I can only say this smokes her consensus peak, 1991’s For My Broken Heart. The explanation might be as simple as the present surplus of well-schooled songwriters making it easier than ever to make an excellent trad country album if you have the resources, rich midrange, and inclination to do so. The song Brandy Clark contributes to, for instance, stands out only because of its explicit pedantic evocation of country history (“This is Tammy Wynette/We’re talking Tammy Wynette/No seriously Tammy Wynette kind of pain”); the rest of the record is comparably melodic and at least as clever. It’s still a trad country album, though, which means it employs melodrama and exaggerated emotions in ways that overeducated audiences might want to put on a cringe compilation. In the case of “Freedom”, they’re right about the exaggerated emotions: the problem’s not its claim that the freedom to love can be worth dying for, because it can be, but that the chorus and production use a star-spangled sack of bricks to beat all possible reflection on whether our actions really are freedom-increasing out of us. But hit skip on that one and let yourself enjoy melodrama’s malleability: if you can’t appreciate a long-time genial three-camera sitcom mom singing (as a quote, but still) “My mama’s first love was crack/She made her living lying on her back”, you’ll probably never find out how the hell the woman next to you got a cactus on to the plane.

127. Cornershop: Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast (2010)

128. Oneohtrix Point Never: R Plus Seven (2013)

129. The Black Madonna: The Bunker Podcast 099 (2015)

130. Childbirth: It’s a Girl (2014)

131. Sleigh Bells: Jessica Rabbit (2016)

132. Inter Arma: Sulphur English (2019)

     You don’t need to be a Game of Thrones showrunner to find out that uniting ambitiously-scaled grandeur with human-level concerns is hard: countless leather-or-vegan-equivalent-clad bands with more graduate degrees than me have failed at it. Inter Arma have pulled it off a second time, and neither metal fans nor haters will be happy to hear this makes them contenders for best metal band ever, as well as best rock band in the world right now. The painstaking production with the pomp, with every low-pitched chord earth-moving and Mike Paparo’s growl sounding like it comes from one of the scary, Kabbalistic kind of seraphim. And yet the songs center the struggle of individuals and small groups against demons — some perhaps literal, others age-old enemies like time and depression — and the triumph of finding moments of stillness during the war. The exception is the title track, which is as about as blatant an anti-Trump screed as the genre permits. Inspirational verse: “Sever the corrupt tongue of the imperious fool/Silence the gangrenous root of his abhorrent voice.”

133. Vampire Weekend: Contra (2010)

134. Parquet Courts: Content Nausea (2014)

135. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap (2013)

136. Jlin: Black Origami (2017)

     In Northern Indiana, the music dances on you. This is more complex and for the most part more likable than her previous Dark Energy. It’s dominated by very digital-sounding percussion, swathed in liberally yet artfully deployed reverb, that refuses any hint of nostalgia. “Hatshepsut,” for instance, starts off with big though human-scale drums that give way to the machines, before the two coalesce into a Mensch-Maschine or maybe a Terminator. You can still recognize footwork as the endoskeleton that allows the samples to strutter, but the rhythmic regularities here function less as floor-fillers than as demonstrations of deep-learning prowess. This is music to write manifestos to; what the content of those manifestos might be will depend heavily on who one thinks just about the only comprehensible lyrics on the album, on a song called “1%,” are addressed to: “you’re all going to die down here.”

137. Pistol Annies: Interstate Gospel (2018)

     The debut towers over this by the height of a pair of pink Joyce Echols heels — it has more struggle, more insight — but it’s Yao Ming compared to almost any other country album this decade (except Platinum) (and Hero, but I’m not ridesharing that Mercedes now.) Aside from Angaleena’s “Commissary”, a brutal letter to a probably-brother addict (oddly misread by some as taking vicarious pleasure in prison beatings), their reaction to shit is a shit-happens front that might mask profoundly mixed emotions — it’s likely the three of them have different takes on their mothers all failing to run off with the milkmen. The joy here is in stuff: not the joy of acquiring stuff, especially when you’re just getting back the name you shouldn’t have lost in the first place, but of the possibilities implicit in having stuff. Isn’t that what sugar daddies are for?

138. Mindtroll: EP #4 (2014)

139. Yo-Yo Ma, Esa-Pekka Salonen, LA Philharmonic: Salonen: Cello Concerto (2019)

     If you’re the sort of listener who picks a token classical album every couple of years, here’s the one. Three distinctive movements, nothing completely unprecedented, but the loops offer some 21st century flavor to accompany the high-modernist callbacks. Having spent almost his entire life crossing over to the likes of JFK and Elmo, it’s easy to forget that Ma has crazy chops, and here he displays the temperament to apply them to contemporary work. He’s lyrical even when Salonen has him sound like a seagull, and his alto flute and bongo dance partners are up to the task. The last movement climaxes with an insane high note amidst echoes of earlier squawks, as if Salonen’s admitting that a blood-soaked Ma has won this one.

140. Rudresh Mahanthappa: Bird Calls (2015)

141. Burial: Kindred EP (2012)

142. Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold (2012)

143. Henry Threadgill 14 or 15 Kestra: Dirt… and More Dirt (2018)

     I’ve admired more than loved Threadgill’s theory-driven work over the quarter century since Too Much Sugar for a Dime. But the first of the two suites here is undeniably one of his most complex and varied works. Several pairs of doubled-up instruments (drums, flute, trumpet, trombone, plus three altos) allow a cornucopia of harmonic effects. I don’t know if this constitutes an “entirely new system of improvisation based on preconceived series of intervals,” but the structure permits just about everyone to have a shining moment, even the triangle guy. Yet the rhythm is still the thing, as the ensemble stops and starts and turns hairpins like the tightest traditionalists. The shorter and simpler And More Dirt shows that Threadgill and pals could do a lot more of this if they wanted to. I hope they do.

144. Youssou Ndour: Senegal Rekk EP (2016)

145. Dessa: A Badly Broken Code (2010)

146. Serengeti: C.A.R. (2012)

147. Tom Zé: Estudando a Bossa (2010)

148. Matt Wilson's Big Happy Family: Beginning of a Memory (2016)

     As a kid I found funerals sad but fun, since distant cousins I rarely saw would show up and the food at the reception afterwards would be pretty good. Substituting jazz for hors d’oeuvres, drummer Wilson celebrates his late wife Felicia by inviting every New York musician he knows to rifle through his tune collection. While the band works up a heck of an exuberant din on some of the ones named after root vegetables, the mood is contemplative and wistful even when they’re loud. Kirk Knuffke and Terell Stafford contribute frequent poignant honks, and bassist Yosuke Inoue sends his condolences via an unaccompanied, unexpectedly touching stretch of “Endless Love.” And yet Wilson smashing away at the backbeat of “Schoolboy Thug” might be the most romantic moment on the album.

149. Steven Wilson: Hand Cannot Erase (2015)

     Always be suspicious of “but I know what I like” opinions, but this is the best prog album I’ve heard, for what that’s worth from someone who’s never liked a Yes record. It helps that the plot is earthly — young woman moves to London, disappears, no one notices — and that the mid-song mood shifts seem not merely willful but to, gulp, serve the narrative. The time changes are more gratuitous, but they’re as beautiful as the painstakingly processed synth tones. If Wilson doesn’t have any special insight into broadband-era alienation, he, like Sofia Coppola, makes up for it with sympathy and good help. Plus he only breaks out the dulcimer on one track, though it’s the 13-minute one. The title track shows he can write a cracked, lacquered pop song as well as Marshall Crenshaw when he puts his mind to it. Facebook fan complaints about new material give me hope he’s doing so more often.

150. Noura Mint Seymali: Arbina (2016)

151. Mary Halvorson Septet: Illusionary Sea (2013)

152. Elder: Lore (2015)

153. Andrew Norman, Gustavo Dudamel, Los Angeles Philharmonic: Sustain (2019)

154. Azealia Banks: Broke with Expensive Taste (2014)

155. Jens Lekman: Life Will See You Now (2017)

     It took me literally all year but I finally think this deserves its plaudits; apparently I’m just as prone as anyone to “but I loved the last one” syndrome. I was skeptical about the instrumentation and a certain lack of focus in the writing, and I stand by my initial take on the former (I’m way past steel drums.) Yet I’ve come to appreciate his shaggy-yet-concrete style of storytelling, in which he seems write himself into a corner then finds some way of escaping, even if it’s through something as simple as a “woo” to detonate the meta-ness bomb he put on the ferris wheel in a controlled explosion. And the tenderness in both his melodies and his delivery of them is as lovable as ever.

156. Jeremy Denk: Ligeti/Beethoven (2012)

157. Katy B: On a Mission (2011)

158. Future: Pluto 3D (2012)

159. Barker: Debiasing EP (2018)

     Faced with Berlin’s rapidly increasing rents and spottier-than-Spotify’s royalty payments from party venues, Sam Barker made a listener’s club record, deconstructing what it means for a record to be “danceable”; Berghain danced to it anyway. Roland must be reeling at this late revelation that you can make a techno record without techno drums, except near-subliminally on the closing track. And it’s beautiful, with the synth patterns tapping out complex and varied rhythms and melodies sometimes explicit and sometimes implied by varying the emphasis of different mix elements. All that’s needed to make this as effervescent as Hyuna is a set of donking 808’d remixes. Bubble bubble, pop pop.

160. Superchunk: What a Time to Be Alive (2018)

     I didn’t carefully check if their shredding has truly become more majestic in the last eight let alone twenty-eight years, but whether it’s real or a mirage in the wake of wokeness, it sure feels like this is the first time the guitarists have been as good as their drummer since their drummer became Jon Wurster. These lifelong liberals driven to #theresistance are possibly less ideologically rigorous than Bernie and I might like. But they banish past tweeness to the memory dump with I-was-there analysis of what brought us to this moment, complemented by pugilistic hate more focused than any number of shitposts. As a mea culpa for his generation of Reagan-era teens, an unusually conservative generation who haven’t begun to have thrown at them the shit that Boomers get as a matter of course, Mac McCaughan’s willing to throw or, let’s get real, take a punch from any direction if it reminds you it’s more useful to vote and to give the ACLU a few bucks.

161. BIGBANG: Alive EP (2012)

162. Bombino: Azel (2016)

163. Rachid Taha: Zoom (2013)

164. Jaakko Laitinen & Väärä Raha: Näennäinen (2017)

     You bet I copy-pasted that. Laitinen sings romantic baritone with just enough gruffness to make his bravado (not to mention vibrato) feel informed by experience. Väärä Raha translates to “counterfeit money,” and there does seem to be something if not feigned then ironic about their gypsy moves and exotic grooves (TIL Finnish tango is a thing), or maybe I’ve watched too many Kaurismäki movies. Or maybe they’re just drunk, though how could drunks keep it tight through the ritardandos and accelerandos they pull off here? Again: experience.

165. Mannequin Pussy: Patience (2019)

     Retaining their guitar squalls and big beat, they’re increasingly willing to take their time — at 24 minutes, this is half as long again as Romantic. With Epitaph’s money to play with, reluctant culture hero Marisa Dabice’s vocals are front and center. And whether it’s because of this or because of her thirties, she’s putting more of herself into the songs, with two songs called “Drunk” that risk the pathetic: how refreshing to once again have a culture hero who can deliver an “I still love you, you stupid fuck” with no loss of ferocity. Maybe rage is what she best knows how to express, and by using it to push against her limits, she can get beyond them; maybe she’s just too hard on herself. In the latter case, her bravest move might be the happy ending.

166. Elizabeth Cook: Welder (2010)

167. Le Grand Kalle: His Life, His Music (2013)

168. Saigon: The Greatest Story Never Told (2011)

169. Noura Mint Seymali: Tzenni (2014)

170. Superorganism (2018)

     Really fun record that stands out in a time where nobody in the Anglophone world is having fun, save perhaps Australasians doing a year in England: the band’s illusion of carefree effortlessness will at least take a temporary hit if their New Zealanders’ visas run out. They’re as shameless as early Max Martin, pilfering sound effect stock libraries for ka-chings and booms and similar onomatopoeias. If Orono Noguchi, who isn’t so desperate to be famous that she hits her notes down the middle, is the glycoprotein holding the organism together, all eight or however many of them there are have their role in keeping the mood warm and upbeat. A band making the fact that “nobody cares” a reason for (muted) celebration: what is this, the Nineties?

171. Nicki Minaj: Roman Reloaded/The Re-Up (2012)

172. Mekons: Ancient & Modern (2011)

173. Ladysmith Black Mambazo: Always with Us (Uyohlale Unathi) (2014)

     I don’t claim to have heard more than four of their albums — less than ten percent! — but this is so different from the other three that I ask: is there anything else like this? The distinction is that there’s both men and multiple women (none of whom are Dolly Parton), the latter borrowed from old recordings of murdered matriarch Nellie Shabalala’s Women of Mambazo, some of which surfaced on the 2002 album Mamizolo, only they sound completed and brightened here. Leads sing simple, plaintive lines, while the massed bass provides the rock solidity the lyrics might well be about. I don’t know if there are cultural conventions that discourage Zulu men and women from collaborating on the regular or if there’s a lode of this stuff, but for now I’ll take this 35 minutes of magic as the gift it is.

174. K. Michelle: More Issues Than Vogue (2016)

175. Lori McKenna: Massachusetts (2013)

     I find the six co-writes (“country-generic” per genre skeptic Christgau) are a relief: she does lean dry without collaborators, and I’m not going to sniff at a rousing chorus even if it contradicts the premise of “Shouting.” Still, it’s the all-by-herself songs that have the higher density of “OMG that line,” sometimes achieving peak Lucinda escalation. At this point the urge to lyric-quote becomes irresistible, so imagine these delivered with a dryness Little Big Town would not find profit-maximizing: “My left hand still fits into your right hand” (good, hardly unprecedented)/“I memorized every line that’s on your face” (country-generic glue)/“And I may have been the cause of some of those scars” (!) (Also listen to the delivery here, deft reading of a complex line)/“There’s not many I’d erase” (!!!) Though not every word hurts, there’s always the threat the next one will.

176. Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbott: What Have We Become? (2014)

177. Denzel Curry: Zuu (2019)

     His paean to black Miami is a bit more subtle than naming yourself Flo Rida, but still comprehensible to anyone who bothers to Google who Ice Billion Berg is. The distorted synths and pitch-shifting illustrated the chaos and conflicting voices that threaten to unbalance a Carol City kid trying to figure out his loyalties without missing a Dragonball episode (even during the interminable Buu saga.) After Ta13oo’s textural variety, it’s something of a retrenchment that hardness wins out so definitively: the murder of his ex-roommate XXXTentacion is reckoned with only though a determination to survive to his next birthday. But that and “I’d rather see a man live than a man die” point toward a future.

178. Jenny Scheinman: The Littlest Prisoner (2014)

179. Eric Revis Trio: City of Asylum (2013)

180. Starlito: Funerals and Court Dates (2012)

181. Red Velvet: The ReVe Festival Finale (2019)

     The strongest girl group of the last decade finally, if accidentally, makes a full-length worthy of their talents and color schemes by adding three out of four good new ones to two decent EPs. Best of the fresh ones is “Psycho”, a riff on, of all things, “Creep”, compensating for a lack of Jonny Greenwood with a clever arrangement and actual good singing. Yet that track’s (psycho-)logical angle is atypical. Their comparative advantage is unadulterated sensation, as they bombard you with onomatopoeia and repetitions that register as pure sound regardless of whether you have the color-coded lyrics in front of you. It’s sunshine and sunshowers and bicycles and sand on the beach. It’s outside.

182. Michael Formanek’s Ensemble Kolossus: The Distance (2016)

     Halvorson! Berne! Alessi! Kris Davis! Formanek’s big band has more stars than can fit on the marquee. After the hushed opener, Formanek begins the “Exoskeleton” suite unaccompanied on double-bass and MVP Davis gets lyrical on the “Prelude.” It’s only when they get to the inaccurately-named “Impenetrable” movement that the band starts blasting. The sheer variety of moods in the movements is most impressive — cagey then fluid, full then spare. The cycle reaches its peak with the dark low-register funk of “Shucking While Jiving” breaking free then finding form again in time for the snappy “A Reptile Dysfunction.” The concluding free improv sees Formanek’s bass finally emerge from the exoskeleton for a well-deserved curtain call.

183. Nik Bärtsch’s Continuum: Mobile (2016)

     Nominal jazzbo and friend of Laurie Anderson Bärtsch leads two groups: Ronin, which is Swiss funk for musicologists who think Music for 18 Musicians was way too garish, and Mobile, which is the more minimal of the two. Between them they have a string of well-regarded records, including Stoa and Holon, both of which I like to a similar degree to this one. The distinguishing feature here is three tracks with a string quintet, who introduce motifs with as many as two notes or fill frequencies Bärtsch’s fingers can’t tinkle as pianissimally as he’d like. Elsewhere, when Bärtsch is treating his piano like the percussion instrument it is, it’s left to the bass clarinet to brood or blurt in the lower register for mood. The two drummers keep drumming.

184. Star Band de Dakar: Psicodelia Afro-Cubana de Senegal (2019)

     Misfiled under Etoile de Dakar on the dominant streaming service, this is the best way yet to hear the band that spawned Etoile and Baobab. It’s very nearly straight relaxed-pace salsa, with the main distinctively Senegalese feature the lead vox by Laba Sosseh and Papa Fall and the main forward-looking element the pitch-bending guitar work of Manjour M’Boup on the later-dated tracks. But even the unsung trumpeter Iaye Thiame, while sticking to the mainline, shows flair and accuracy rarely apparently on latter day Afrocomps. This collection is kept to half an hour for coherence, and while I’d welcome a second volume with some Youssou and maybe some Attisso if we can gerrymander a little, I doubt it’d be as satisfying.

185. Shape Worship: A City Remembrancer (2015)

186. Velkro: Don't Wait for the Revolution (2014)

187. Johan Lindström Septett: Music for Empty Halls (2018)

     What’s most impressive here is the way the group works through such a variety of tone palettes — reed dudes Jonas Kullhammar and Per “Texas” Johansson (all Swedish instrumentalists should have a U.S. state as a nickname) blow into seven woodwinds, while Jonas “Hawaii” Lindström sometimes puts down his regular guitar to play unusually expressive pedal steel, his low notes seeming to bend in circles, or to just bang on things. Yet from a firmly-blown opener to a string-accompanied closing hymn, the album attains unity, thanks to “Massachusetts” Lindström’s compositional approach, which always keeps an eye on beauty (not to mention production that always keeps an ear on reverb.) Thank him for showing the tradition linking Pinetop Smith and Kraftwerk is more continuous than both Eurosnobs and Europhobes think.

188. Carolina Chocolate Drops/Luminescent Orchestri EP (2011)

189. Janelle Monáe: Dirty Computer (2018)

     As far as prog-to-pop moves go, this is at least as principled as Muse’s. It’s still all over the place, but there are enough concessions to her still hypothetical mass audience, not least in terms of length, to make this her first record I’ve wanted to play all the way through on the regular. Not that she cares, or needs to care, what I think: she’s adamant in foregrounding women’s experiences and opinions even if it’s at the expense of men’s, which seems reasonable. Once she gets down to specifics with “Screwed”, the grooves are as hard and her hooks as bright as the Eighties’ conquerors of MTV, only her focus is on women’s bodies as a source of strength (not to mention pleasure) in a way that Prince necessarily couldn’t manage. Now if she could get rid of that “hypothetical” above, it could be her America.

190. Withered Hand: New Gods (2014)

191. Earl Sweatshirt: I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside (2015)

192. Dave Rempis, Brandon Lopes & Ryan Packard: The Early Bird Gets (2019)

     An ostensibly Chicago-avant trio that seem like they want to be playing post-bop instead. They swing with a looseness that’s not sloppy but flies as wildly as the dinobirds of their titles. On “Raho Navis,” Rempis speeds through the tune like another earlier Bird, but the rhythm players never let the cut settle. Also admirable is their ability to change up mood or tempo mid-track, effortlessly locking in a new groove. Occasional laptoppery from Packard frees up Lopez’s bass to explore a different palette of sounds, only midway through “Archae Opteryx” Rempis decides to play a busted-open ballad instead and Packard is sent scurrying back to his percussion kit. Punctuated equilibrium!

193. ICP Orchestra: ICP 049 (2010)

194. Kesha: Animal Minus the Luke Songs (2010)

195. Kefaya + Elaha Soroor: Songs of Our Mothers (2019)

     A veteran of reality show Afghan Star, Farsi-speaking Hazara singer Sahoor released a song against stoning women and, after a bunch of death threats, sought asylum in the U.K. There she met Giuliano Modarelli and Al MacSween; this is their second album as a trio. Their approach varies by song: sometimes they take Sahoor’s songs and put them into recognizable groove-rock settings, a la Dengue Fever, other times they lean trad or even dubby. Sahoor provides unity to the album simply by being a singer worthy of winning a TV talent show. Whether adorning the melodies with microtonal decoration or falling under the spell of light Auto-Tune, she does her mothers proud by sounding like herself.

196. Lionel Loueke: Gaia (2015)

197. Angaleena Presley: Wrangled (2017)

     She does a better job than anyone of capturing the resentment apparently felt by a dark-red fraction of rural America right now without deplorably reducing virtue to identity signifiers like guest Yelawolf does when he raps “thank God for Sturgill Simpson” (Yela’s angling for a spot on the Grammy committee.) When she rails against jeans-jeans-jeans bros and “whores from high school,” she makes it seem she has specific wrongdoers in mind, delivering her from prejudice against whole sub-populations (some of her best bandmates are blonde.) Her delivery is mild but knowing, so that the pleasure of explicit revenge is confounded with the pleasure of being smarter and better than the mean girls, which she is. There’s a danger of becoming nothing more than a mean girl herself if she ever gets her hits and money, but as she hasn’t yet, I’m on her side: I’d just take care not to cross her.

198. Brandy Clark: Big Day in a Small Town (2016)

199. Tami Neilson: Dynamite! (2014)

200. Old 97's: Most Messed Up (2014)

201. Tom Waits: Bad as Me (2011)

202. Youssou N'Dour & le Super Étoile de Dakar: Fatteliku: Live in Athens 1987 (2015)

     Raxas Bercy showcases post-apostrophe Ndour as Africa’s greatest superstar (the case becomes a slam dunk when you can see it); this has him as Africa’s hottest young singer, whose astonishing voice is still so lacking in international cachet that he’s supporting Peter Gabriel (who in fairness was absurdly popular in 1987.) “Nelson Mandela” is a blatant attempt to rectify this, but it’s hard to complain about his political commitment even if shouting out Zimbabwe isn’t as unifying today as it was 30 years ago. But otherwise concessions to Western (slash Near Eastern) ears don’t go much beyond calling for handclaps in English. The band mostly plays straight sax-and-guitars mbalax, with a rhythm section in such disciplined form that Habib Faye, early in his tenure as Ndour’s shot-caller that only ended with his death this April, can afford a turn on the keys from time to time. As a bonus, Gabriel and Ndour team up for an “In Your Eyes,” which is worth hearing up to twice.

203. Mostly Other People Do the Killing: Forty Fort (2010)

204. Reniss: Tendon (2016)

     Polyglot Cameroonian in her late twenties at the time of this release fuses a continent’s worth of dance musics and turns it into pop: worldtown, we called it once. Whether appropriating Ghanan guitar and Jamaican skank or collecting the rent on Jacko’s makossa or screaming to assert her sovereignty over her sauce over a 6/8 beat, she’s open and welcoming, provided you keep your hands to yourself. The album does a good job of scratching the itch the last Robyn album didn’t, with producer Jovi keeping the tempo up and contributing impressively non-dickish vocals. But it’s Reniss’ tone that holds the album together, making concepts like “swagga” and “chakine chakine” meaningful in Indo-European and Bantoid and all creoles in between.

205. Twice: Feel Special EP (2019)

     A nine-piece formed through Sixteen, a reality show designed to emotionally abuse teenage girls, they’re now in their twenties and K-pop’s most successful girl group. Title track is a classic, with hyperchipmunking and a moment after the second chorus where it threatened to lurch into a dubstep bridge before saying just kidding, it’s 2019. The percussion is great throughout, even on the token slow one. All that’s lacking is the vocal differentiation often absent from these mega-groups — reality show loser Somi’s “Birthday” is a super-classic in part because she has the ability and opportunity to put her individuality on record. But they’re richer than her, so do they care?

206. Mary J. Blige: Strength of a Woman (2017)

     The second-most apropos title of her career (after A Mary Christmas) tempts us to read this as about her divorce, and it can’t help but be, but the law firm charged with keeping her alimony manageable will point out she’s been singing about wasting years of her life with deadbeats since long before her marriage. The result is both a personal statement and a declaration of solidarity with other long-suffering women. In the very act of singing “you gotta love yourself before you love somebody else,” she’s satisfying the dependent clause (guest Kanye is useful as a contrast.)

207. Jenny Lewis: The Voyager (2014)

208. Miles Davis: At Newport 1973 (2015)

209. Screaming Females: Ugly (2012)

210. Cartagena! (2011)

211. Odwalla88: Earth Flirt/Lilly 23 (2016)

212. Angelika Niescier, Christopher Tordini, & Tyshawn Sorey: The Berlin Concert (2018)

     The opening “Kundry”, named after Wagner’s tortured temptress (well, one of them), is one of the most aerobically impressive performances in recent memory. Niescier comes out blazing like she’s using her alto to play one of those bullet hell arcade games where there are a hundred things on the screen to shoot before they shoot you, and when she’s done she has Tyshawn Sorey finish the level with characteristic energy and precision. The closing “The Surge” starts with a high honking motif that acts as a storm warning, and for the next seven minutes all we can do is hold on and hope the levee holds. The two tracks in the middle are quieter, allowing a few moments to do German things, like synchronize watches and contemplate mortality.

213. Rocco John & Improvisational Composers Ensemble: Peace and Love: A Tribute to Will Connell (2017)

     Old school loft guy assembles his octet at John Zorn’s dive to play three long compositions that allow the soloists to select their manner and level of abstraction(s), so that the bass clarinet and flute can alternate pleasant tonal phrases with squawks, while Rocco himself sticks with sax melodies — weird ones, but melodies nonetheless. The strength here is the sonic palette: in addition to Sana Nagano providing some of the most incisive avant violin since Billy Bang passed, the group makes even bells and flute seem not just tolerable but integral. Consumer note: my Bandcamp download came with an 18-minute bonus track that’s as good as anything else here.

214. PJ Harvey: Let England Shake (2011)

215. Taraf de Haidouks: Of Lovers, Gamblers and Parachute Skirts (2015)

216. Epik High: 99 EP (2012)

217. The Rough Guide to Brazilian Jazz (2016)

     This is something it would’ve been helpful to listen to before beginning to work through Brazil Beat Blog’s recs, though had I done so then I might have found it hard to swallow that “Brazilian jazz” didn’t really mean “jazz from Brazil.” Tulipa Ruiz, Juçara Marçal, and for a minute and a half Thiago França (who gets an encore with his straightish ensemble Space Charanga) make strong individualist post-MPB statements; several Afro-appropriating big bands pass by quickly enough that they seem more like revelations than rip-offs; plus there’s something called “Meu RapJazz” that isn’t as bad as that sounds. There’s also some jazz from Brazil; it’s fine.

218. Sahra Halgan: Faransiskiyo Somaliland (2016)

     “Halgan” means “combatant,” an unofficial title the Somaliland independence movement bestowed on this singer who moonlighted as a Red Cross nurse during the bombardment of the north by Mogadishu-led forces. After a couple of decades in Lyon, she returned to unrecognized capital and longtime arts hotbed Hargeisa to run some kind of studio (and star in a documentary, as one does.) Rather than the sparseness of the Horn’s traditional music, her time abroad and her French backing band have produced songs recognizable as such accompanied by guitar, drums, and sometimes double-bass. The sound falls within what we Westerners call desert blues, with Halgan’s wobbling around the notes singing parallelling Arabic microtonality. Exploring the folkloric feel that takes hold on the voices-and-claps final track would make for an intriguing follow-up.

219. Mike Reed’s People, Places & Things: Clean on the Corner (2012)

220. África Negra: Alia Cu Omalí (2019)

     The most shameless retromaniacal indulgence on São Tomé’s greatest band’s comeback is the topless woman on the cover. Singer João Seria and rhythm guitarist Leonildo Barros lead friends and ringers to recreate, seemingly effortlessly, their original band’s rumba-based cocktail recipe, perfected by trial and error in the Seventies and Eighties. Every sound down to the reco-reco’s scrapings is in tune and on time, with the leads from longtime guitarist António Menezes particularly fine — they could’ve come pre-meandering era soukous. Yet the totality feels timeless rather than dated, as if there’s nothing oil companies and the IMF can do to spoil the band’s four-decade beach party. Which is a pleasant fiction.

221. Tami Neilson: The Kitchen Table Sessions II (2011)

222. Paul Shapiro: Shofarot Verses (2014)

223. Carlos Kalmar/Oregon Symphony: Music for a Time of War (2011)

224. Vince Staples: Prima Donna EP (2016)

225. Kepler Quartet: Ben Johnston: String Quartets Nos. 6, 7, & 8 (2016)

     Microtonal madness, to the extent that the composer has no idea how many notes he’s using. It sounds “off”, but it also sounds totally self-consistent to the untrained ear. №7 is, as far as I can tell, one of the best works of its kind: scene-setting first movement (composer’s instructions: “Scurrying, forceful, intense”), idea-developing second (“Eerie”), drawn-out third (“With solemnity”) that feels so rigorous you could put a Q.E.D. at the end. The rest is fun too (for prime-numeratored ratio values of “fun”), though the one-movement №6, demoted to the back end, does run on. Getting a croaky singer to intone “Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died” on the coda is a cheap way of getting thanatophobes to play the whole thing again.

226. Red Velvet: Ice Cream Cake EP (2015)

227. Constantinople & Ablaye Cissoko: Traversées (2019)

     Montreal-based period music nerds join with a kora-playing Mandikan griot descendant for a stately fusion. At first I found this a little soft, especially in the singing; now, yeah, who fjucking cares about that. Cissoko is one of the more expressive kora players I can think of, maintaining evenness through his dynamic range. The setar, viol, and percussion backing doesn’t put itself out too much, often just doubling, though there are some fine contrapuntal lines evoking Persian roots. The intercontinental material is a reminder there’s still a nonline world more than six feet from us. Balm.

228. My Bloody Valentine: M B V (2013)

229. D’Angelo: Black Messiah (2014)

230. Aphex Twin: Syro (2014)

     An immense palette used to color the usual Aphex Twin bullshit? Sure, but Syro might be his best bullshit.

231. King of the Road: A Tribute to Roger Miller (2018)

     The most personally useful tribute album I’ve heard. I’d previously enjoyed a dozen Miller credits, but this expands his canon to around 30, with the variety hour-and-a-half feel making this an easier listen than Miller comps a fraction of its length. The show runs like clockwork: it hardly matters than Jamey Johnson and Emmylou Harris fail their dexterity check when they get the hook within three minutes. It’s not surprising that big names with pop leanings (Paisley, Nelson, most delightful Musgraves since she put her same trailer up for sale or rent) are among the savviest performers, but Toad the Wet Sprocket? Huey Lewis? And if the overcrowded final singalong through Miller’s greatest hit makes you feel like a roller skater in a buffalo herd, it’s trivial for digital listeners to substitute the original.

232. Patti Smith: Banga (2012)

233. Paramore (2013)

234. Angles 9: Disappeared Behind the Sun (2017)

     Nine mostly Swedish players without a weak link, so that the lack of a track longer than twelve minutes (as there was on 2014’s otherwise not-quite-as-good Injuries) for once feels like a missed opportunity. While they do nice solos when they feel like it, the rest is honking and stomping and loud dissonance, which we might as well call noise. I love the looseness when the whole band plays heads in harmony, or perhaps just outside. It’s not just that it sounds like things could fall apart at any second, it’s that it sounds like they don’t care if they do. They don’t, though, shutting up in time and letting the vibraphone guy re-establish the tuning.

235. Haiti Direct: Big Band, Mini Jazz & Twoubadou Sounds (2014)

236. Rachid Taha: Bonjour (2010)

237. Titus Andronicus: The Monitor (2010)

238. Andrew W.K.: You’re Not Alone (2018)

     No longer a mere lifestyle, here Wilkes-Krier turns partying into a philosophy. The guitars rock as is contractually obligated, while the bridges and codas, in the best power ballad tradition, allow deep breathing and opportunities to contemplate beauty. W.K. espouses a more sophisticated form of Wordsworth’s secular theodicy, which, like Wordsworth’s, turns out not to be entirely secular, with both God and the devil showing up to offer emotional support and big tunes. Suffering will always exist, but self-actualization is achievable through (and perhaps identical to) the struggle against suffering, the technical term for which is partying. Perhaps the party mindset wouldn’t survive a double-blind trial, but self-help has always been about placebo effects anyway. So someone give this guy an advice column.

239. The xx: Coexist (2012)

240. Matt Lavelle: Goodbye New York, Hello World (2011)

241. Mamamoo: Melting (2016)

242. Avram Fefer Quartet: Testament (2019)

243. The Mountain Goats: Transcendental Youth (2012)

244. Greg Ward & 10 Tongues: Touch My Beloved’s Thought (2016)

245. Live from Festival au Desert Timbuktu (2013)

246. Cloud Nothings: Life Without Sound (2017)

     Mid-tempo intensity is hard and thus usually not good, which perhaps makes it harder for the indie press to recognize a successful attempt when it comes along. So duh, the reviews don’t reflect that this is their best album. Dylan Baldi overcomes writer’s block to craft nine guitar storms in teacups, of which maybe two are merely drizzly. Of young guitar-slingers who sing out of formal convention, he drawls his hooks more artfully than most: “I’m not the one who’s always right” grown-up, “Feel right, feel right, feel right, feel lighter” sensible. As flavors for melody delivery go, one could do worse than thoughtful declarations of humanity.

247. Gary Allan: Set You Free (2013)

248. Lupe Fiasco: Lasers (2011)

249. Future: Beastmode 2 (2018)

     A guy I’ve been skeptical of for like twenty straight mixtapes reunites with Zaytoven, his most simpatico producer, who brings out his most expressive rap-singing since his debut. It’s mixtape rapping rather than album rapping, relying on repeated phrases and patterns, but he grinds harder than usual, with sharp accents and heavy use of his old trick of Autotune-slurring a syllable over several notes. While the women don’t exactly have agency, they’re a little more human than usual (the woman he ditches at a Loews is apparently a real person), and his ennui-with-multiple-luxury-watches comes across as thoughtful rather than rote formalism. Lana Del Rey should take notes on the directness with which he delivers “Damn, I hate the real me,” and even that isn’t as moving as the repeated mantra “I’m tryna get high as I can,” which never gets any higher.

250. Raphael Saadiq: Stone Rollin’ (2011)

There must be stats

Artists with three albums as lead artist: Steve Lehman (one with Rudresh Mahanthappa), Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley (two with the Pistol Annies), Jens Lekman, Parquet Courts, Youssou Ndour, Rachid Taha, Tom Zé. Zé is my artist of the decade (with the caveat that Estudando a Bossa was 2008 in Brazil), ahead of Parquet Courts and Wussy (who thanks to the magic of arbitrary cutoffs only place once here.)

Two albums: Danny Brown, Brandy Clark, Miles Davis, Future, Heems, Inter Arma, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Tami Neilson, Oneohtrix Point Never, William Parker, Pistol Annies, Red Velvet, Noura Mint Seymali, Taylor Swift, Vampire Weekend.

Count by year:

2010: 19
2011: 25
2012: 31
2013: 25
2014: 29
2015: 25
2016: 29
2017: 20
2018: 21
2019: 26

This is consistent with the hypothesis that no year was inherently stronger than any other (P = 0.75 for a chi-squared test, P = 0.86 for a linear regression on year.) The 2010 might be a bit low because because I didn’t start listening systematically until I got unemployed and bored in mid-2011.