40 seemed right for a number of reasons: (1) It’s about a tenth of what I listened to: technically that rule implies top 36.1, but let’s be generous and round up; (2) on the year-end albums lists I put the most stock in, like Christgau’s and Jason Gubbels’s when he used to do them (miss you Jason) I drift off around 50, and my list is at least slightly more boring than theirs; (3) when certain publications do their dreaded 50-1 countdowns I immediately scroll to the bottom and never quite get to the top again. (Rest assured that I don’t hate my audience enough to do countdown lists more than once a decade or so.)
Belated RIP to Jemeel Moondoc. Greg Tate we’ll get to soon.
1. Steve Swell Quintet Soul Travelers: Astonishments (2020)
The foremost astonishment on this free jazz super-ish group’s second album (never heard the vinyl-only first) is the two Swell poems are concrete and strong enough to thrive via Conquest’s emphatic singing. The first is a plainspoken tribute to “lives well lived” by Roswell Rudd, Cecil Taylor, and others, the second is about modifying the America that actually exists through actual existence, an idea I condone as long as that includes posting. Like his mentor and friend Rudd, Swell’s avantisms spring from long engagement with traditional forms; he and Jemeel Moondoc play tight in unison and loose in counterpoint, and solo well above the industry standard. Dave Burrell, entering his seventh decade of finding ways to not quite sound like Cecil Taylor, goes through phases where he appears to be more concerned with rhythmic and melodic shapes than with exact notes, only to hit a chord so right as to imply that so was everything else. William Parker is at his best engineering the most solid of ground from which Conquest can declare “I am here now,” and Gerald Cleaver is as busy as always.
Grade: A (“Astonishments”, “For Mondays”, “Being Here”)
2. Carly Pearce: 29: Written in Stone
Gotta make hay in this biz: after the 29 EP—“the year that I got married and divorced”, according to the title track, plus there was a pandemic you might’ve heard about—sported the best writing of her career, she wasted little time expanding it to fifteen tracks. The new songs are the second-best writing of her career, with “What He Didn’t Do” detailing sins of omission and the duet with approximately-as-famous Ashley McBride emphasizing that those guys have more than one way of making you that girl. Still, the EP’s peaks remain the standouts. She dispenses advice not, as in Taylor Swift’s year songs, from a position of omniscience, but from six inches deep in the carpet. This Ozuesque camera placement lets her put across better than maybe even Tammy that in most of the country, a scarlet D is a long-term humiliation, not to mention a short-term logistical nightmare. Her indignities are dignified through the marginally best singing of her career, with Shane McAnally et al. producing a more traditional sound (meaning early Shania, okay also guest Patty Loveless.) And she rectifies herself to acknowledge there are worse things than long-term humiliations on her tribute to Busbee; she and her team summon appropriately huge snares to send him off.
Grade: A (“29”, “Liability”, “Next Girl”)
“Artsy British woman talks over post-punk” has long been a rewarding micro-genre, and if you’re willing to accept that talking really means talking, sometime fashion illustration lecturer Florence Shaw’s only-sometimes-a-monotone is an eloquent instrument. You might prefer the band’s earlier EPs, particularly Sweet Princess, if you’d rather hear Shaw express her thoughts about stuff conversationally (where the conversations are often as awkward as in the current Fleabag-to-I May Destroy You wave of British cringe, Shaw’s bloody sensibleness notwithstanding) without heavy use of modernist trickery. I’d rather hear her play at disjunction, pasting together Gertrude Stein enigmatic observations with overheard dialogue fragments to give some sense of the multiplicity of contemporary English life. When she shuffles from “I’ve come here to make a ceramic shoe and I’ve come to smash what you made” to “Why don’t you want oven chips now?” in a few lines, she parodies the relentlessly logical progression of her g-b-d. Crucially, there’s plenty to parody. On the LP, they grow from three-and-a-half to four-minute men, using the extra room to stretch newly longer legs, with ex-hardcore guitarist Tom Dowse employing all manner of gear tricks to add weight to his fine-art riffs. Then when Shaw finally does sing, it’s dada, dada.
Grade: A (“Scratchcard Lanyard”, “Unsmart Lady”, “More Big Birds”)
4. Group Doueh & Cheveu: Dakla 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.
Grade: A (“Bord de mer”, “Azawan”, “Tout droit”)
5. Sarah Mary Chadwick: Me and Ennui and Friends, Baby
What marks her as someone transformed by grunge not too long after it reached New Zealand high school stereos is her absolute indifference to making things nice for the listener. She sings over piano like she’s rubbing a handful of pubes in your face, appropriate given the despair and itchiness of her subject matter (heartbreak, hating one’s mother, a suicide attempt which she helpfully dates for you.) But she lets you know it’s her. Aside from two same-sex jealousy songs, she refuses to multitrack vocals, leaving every stubbornly non-rhotic phrase isolated and defiant, her vocal fry and pitchiness proving life. The words are mordant at times (the title track has a bleakly funny interaction with an EMT that oddly parodies Courtney Barnett’s “Avant Gardener”) but the thrill is in their delivery and their context. Crucially, “That feeling like everything’s melting away” is a recalled one, and one is grateful that she survived to recall it and that beauty remains a possibility for her. If you waited a generation for Bluebaby, this is as close as you’re going to get.
Grade: A (“Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby”, “That Feeling Like”, “Let’s Go Home”)
6. Tinashe: 333
Her second album on her own label, and whether because of independence, maturity, or free samples of Jay-Z’s new high-end weed brand, she finally sounds relaxed enough about her fun that I can share in it. There’s a sense of play in her vocals, whether fucking around in her upper register or effortlessly switching between rappy singing and melodic talking. The album charts, not entirely linearly, the course of a relationship from attraction to wild sex to break-up to looking at love from both sides now. She’s open to the possibility of going long-term (whatever that means in LA) as long as it’s on her terms, and if it didn’t work out this time, there are dirty pictures in the cloud to remember it by. Beats are mostly slightly alt while keeping the bass bouncin’. The exception is when she goes full modernist on the title track, employing multiple vocal styles to “sing like a choir” that might well decide to do Gregorian chant next. While high, of course.
Grade: A (“I Can See the Future”, “333”, “Bouncin’”)
7. Olivia Rodrigo: Sour
More than the mallpunk guitars and f-bombs, what makes this a throwback to an era of (real rockists remember) pop self-expression is that the songs, almost all solely by Rodrigo and Dan Nigro, are through-composed. Rather than aiming for hook maximization, the songs have breathing space to let Rodrigo flesh out her everyteen persona, and they end up being plenty catchy anyway. Yet unlike on obvious comparisons Fearless or Pure Heroine or The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, there’s never any sense that Rodrigo is somehow above the fray or has it all worked out. That leaves Taylor Swift as the closest precedent. Both show a remarkable level of craft and an attention to detail that bodes well for when market forces shunt them to grown-up music; both also use genre as a crutch when their ideas don’t quite can’t stop won’t stop, which is fine: that’s what genre’s for. Main reason this is a better album than SwiftCorp One is the singing: Disney should promote whomever coached Rodrigo into having high-end sensitivity without overblowing her patently big voice, or at least get them to oversee the next Frozen soundtrack. All that’s missing is a spark of genius: for all the merits of “Drivers License”, there’s nothing in it that suggests she’ll produce a Fearless next. But fearlessness, not to mention genius, is so some other generation.
Grade: A (“Drivers License”, “Deju Vu”, “Good 4 U”)
8. Anthony Joseph: The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives
(i) I really should read some CLR James, though realistically it’ll be Beyond a Boundary before The Black Jacobins. Outside the context of (Joseph’s words) “beautiful violent revolution”, the album title remains chic, though I wouldn’t mind clarification as to what the threshold for “rich” is: one buck more than my household income would of course be fine (apologies to perhaps the majority of my readership?) (ii) Kamau Braithwaite died February last year? Not sure if I heard this at the time and just forgot because of all the other people who died shortly afterwards. While “Kamau”, the opening track here, is not the greatest modern elegy for a political poet—that’d be Brathwaite’s “Stone”—as a tribute, it’s fitting in its vocabulary and focused indignation. (iii) With the exception of the rotating lineup of tenors (Denys Baptiste probably edges out everywhere-man Shabaka Hastings here) the band is good not great, tight rather than cosmic. But that’s fine: sometimes the words, and the performance of those words, are the most important things. (iv) These really are good words, with family and historical details filling out a unified vision of West Indies-to-England radical life, delivered by Joseph with finesse, authority, and swing. Whether it’s good praxis is beyond my ability to determine.
Grade: A (“Language (Poem for Anthony McNeill)”, “Calling England Home”, “Swing Praxis”)
9. Kalie Shorr: I Got Here by Accident EP
I admit I harbored a moment of doubt when I counted one good song out of three on her first EP of the year, until I realized it was a (Dixie-no-more) Chicks covers record. As someone whose first post-vaccination concert was the Jagged Little Pill anniversary tour last month, I have no qualms about her second, though it’s unlikely Aging Alt FM will give her more airplay than Bro 101 did. She reconfigures the formal and linguistic tricks she learned as a Song Suffragette, most ticklingly when she brings new meaning to the term “pregnant pause”, while her literary peak is “I was born twelve hundred feet from the ocean/Two hundred feet from a bar”. She also borrows the Morissettian technique of spitefully cramming way too many syllables into a line, except when she does it I can make out the words. Five good songs out of five is my count this time, thanks to more open-book family history, a little sprightly pain, and a lot of disdain well-aimed so as to avoid collateral damage. She only has to scratch her nails down Amy’s back metaphorically for you, and her, to feel it.
Grade: A (“I Heard You Got a Girl”, “Amy”, “Love Child”)
10. Parquet Courts: Sympathy for Life
The last great American rock band (unless metal counts) keeps evolving. In interviews the band has mumbled about collectivism, acid, and Screamadelica, but this sounds a lot more like 2000s NYC dance-punks like the Rapture, admittedly not a band anyone would admit to ripping off right now. Still, if there’s a 2000s dance-punk album that so consistently parlays guitar and non-guitar hooks into proper song structures, or that blends acoustic and human-free sounds as fetchingly as on “Application/Apparatus”, or that features such a good bass player, I’ve forgotten it, and that’s before we get to the writing. They claim to have had most of this in the can before the first COVID lockdown, in which case they’re either full of shit or clairvoyant for an opening track that’s about learning to love crowds again. The BLM song “Marathon of Anger” is definitely 2020, its chronologically confused chorus “It’s time everyone gone to work” resonantly symbolizing that year. Everyone’s gone where?
Grade: A (“Walking at a Downtown Pace”, “Zoom Out”, “Application/Apparatus”)
Dua Lipa & the Blessed Madonna: Club Future Nostalgia (2020)
Japanese Breakfast: Jubilee
François Carrier: Glow
Carcass: Torn Arteries
Nathan Bell: Red, White and American Blues (It Couldn’t Happen Here)
Manu Maltez: O Rabequeiro Maneta e a Fúria de Natureza (2018)
Robyn Ottolini: I’m Not Always Hilarious, But I’m Not Always Sad Either
Next week: Top tens for books, comics, stories, and more! (Not much more.)