My Favorite Albums of 2019
Let’s look backwards.
La Petite Mort — Disco
Emo is currently undergoing a mass polarization. There’s several active, abrasive skramz scenes and, unfortunately, many more goober fratmo clubs.
Is it so wrong to want a band that can find harmony in erratic hardcore and pugnacity in flamboyant art rock? Is it so sinful to want conference between beauty and mosh? I don’t think so, and neither does La Petite Mort.
Following a thematic explored by past and contemporary legends Orchid and Shizune, DISCO indulges itself with dithyrambic reverie. The band describes the album as “a party you half-accidentally stumble into,” a sort of drunken microdimension. Think of it as the Other Place in Coraline, but populated by vodka-blooded hardcore hants instead of beldam illusions and tortures.
Little Death play with a celebratory verve, near-nauseous rhythms and guitar licks that sound as if they’re about to skip into a busy intersection somewhere in the h i p district of whatever city you live in. So many post-hardcore bands could learn from DISCO. “Heaviness” doesn’t unilaterally explicate aggression, or vice versa. Gaiety has a fierceness too:
Roaring applause for the dying beast.
Throwing up! Throwing up, laughing
and sweating blood. Sweating blood.
I Hate Models — L’Âge Des Métamorphoses
Presently, it’s very fashionable for liberal political commentators to proclaim that we are hurtling towards dystopia. This is concerning, because holy shit, where have you assholes been? We have been living under a dystopian regime since the Model T first rumbled and puffed onto Detroit’s streets. I Hate Models’s despotic techno mirrors an evolution in capital’s dictatorship, the surveillance of snapchat, the atomization of facebook, the mind-numbing laser show of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
We all face psychic bombardments daily from an encompassing hyperreality and I think a reasonable and effective way to resolve, or at least sublimate, that cerebral trauma is to surrender to this album’s nocturnal, quaking patterns.
I’ve seen some very online EBM critics decry I Hate Models as too repetitive, which seems to be an odd critique, even for more experimental dance music. The Fordist onslaught of L’Âge Des Métamorphoses’s piston kick drums and serrated synth leads expound on our beleaguered era better than any sociology seminar. Few represent the repetitious disorder of the contemporary as honestly as this DJ/producer.
C Duncan — Health
Poptimism can eat dog shit.
Obviously, pop itself isn’t completely indefensible, as made evident by sincere artists like C Duncan. Poptimism is exhausting because there’s a cadre of media doofuses that think we need incisive analyses of Taylor Swift and The 1975. We don’t. Personally, I like to invest the finite amount of time in my life listening to and thinking about good music. C Duncan very clearly has studied good music, notably UK New Romanticism, vocal jazz, and late 70’s rnb.
As I write this, “Circles” by Post-Malone, a song that sounds like it was generated by an algorithm, is the #1 hit in America. This is demonstrative of what bad pop is, rigid circuitry. Health offers a more organic tautness, notably on the vocal tracks. Duncan croons with a Byronic smokiness, but in defiance of conventionally understood physics, this smoke gets cajoled and knotted into astonishingly intricate harmonies. My favorite vocal performance of the year without contest.
Much of Health traipses in and out of rhythmic irregularities not typically heard in pop (that doesn’t emphatically declare itself experimental). That technical ambition is refreshing to hear, particularly on an album that otherwise pops in the classical sense. The mastering here is slick and chic and very 2019 pristine, but the instrumentation luxuriates with the lavaliere of quintessential Billboard timbres of the late 20th Century. Synthpoppy basslines, funky staccato guitar picking, disco strings, all of that 60s-80s flare, but the album manages to not sound like the unabashed nostalgic kitsch of Bruno Mars or Charlie Puth or like, every other visible popstar right now.
The UK’s famed tradition of sophistipop has evolved yet again.
Pezzettino — Resin
Resin finds itself in an Oakland studio apartment, a scene at the threshold of homely and sparse. At least, that’s the type of space that feels the most ideal to host the various flitting images and stoic considerations proffered here: “I always wanted to be / A camera on a tripod / Facing a great divide.”
More so than the rest of independent music, introspective folk and ambient electronica are especially susceptible to the tedium of flat introversion. Margaret Stutt, the songwriter and voice of Pezzettino, assuredly understands this foible because even at the outfit’s most reticent, they sustain a discrete pulse.
Do you remember when you were a kid? Do you remember coming up with little nonsense tunes that you’d sing to yourself? Resin conveys an intimacy that hums akin to those nursery rhymes. The difference here is that when you were a kid, it was all a solo performance to oneself. Pezzettino very clearly wants to establish direct conversation with the listener. Stutt’s voice has been rendered the locus of the mix, pellucid and amiable, guiding both the amble of the composition and the audience’s attention.
Out of all the folk music I listened to in 2019, I found myself often gravitating back to the genuine repartee of Resin.
Von Pea — City For Sale
Straight up, this is the grooviest release of 2019.
City For Sale cavorts to an irresistible undulation, a poised flow of soulful sampling and penetrative diction. Von Pea is an overt perfectionist, but not in the assembly line sense. He confidently saunters upon each track, intimately comfortable with each tempo, precise with his wordplay. You know he’s studied rap canon. You also know he possesses the savvy to expand on it.
Some rappers can detail a compelling narrative. Some rappers can deliver daedalic lyricism. Von Pea does both in this 42 minute elegy to a now folkloric New York City. If gentrification is ultimately a campaign of theft and historical revision, City For Sale is a responsorial archivization of an assailed working class culture. This LP features some deft wordsmithing, and that itself is thrilling, but I found myself captured by the various plotlines recollected. It’s tragic knowing that the borough depicted on this record has been displaced, if not totally demolished.
The bars spit here pertain to NYC, but the unfortunate political reality is that gentrification has metastasized into a national struggle. Even in my nowhere midwestern city of only 200,000 people, the looting of “redevelopment” has massively altered and disenfranchised communities. City For Sale speaks on the continuous class warfare of a particular environment, but its poignancy encompasses the US as a whole.
Yakui — Imni
Yakui designs the experimental from a mosaic of the familiar, the last 40 years of electronic timbres at the club, in commercials, from avant scenes here and abroad. It would be imprecise to deem this electronica or techno or synthpop or whatever robotronic microgenre comes to mind, although every one of those styles resonate within this lp. I believe it’s more accurate to describe Yakui’s work as the memories of these subgenres, distorted cassette montages, remembered and layered. Or, synthesizers resynthesized as ultramodern sound art.
This record allures with an EDM countenance, but really it’s a work of jolting cartography. I can’t say you’re supposed to shake it to Yakui’s compositions. You’re supposed to visit and observe. Imni isn’t just the dancefloor or the mix, it’s the supermarket soundsystem, the motorola razr playing minutes before 10th grade first period, your work commute playlist; but, caricatures of these moments, dazzling, acceptably ostentatious, caricatures.
Yakui maps out a vibrant untopia, a world that erratically drifts into different settings, and yet is still always recognizable. Typically, I find nostalgia to be effortless and garish, but Imni depicts a motley surrounding of various throbbing energies and I cannot deny its invitation.
Max Gowan — Bygones
A lot of bands equate lushness and bigness. If the guitars and synth pads are smothered by reverb and prominently mixed, then it’s lush right?
It’s not. It’s gloop.
Gowan clearly understands this as he maintains a balance between rich atmospherics and ductile guitar pop. Bygones glides along with a tender confidence one doesn’t often hear in the feigned melodramas and/or petite bourgeois slacker fantasies of independent rock music. We really should be openly thankful for the remaining DIY bands that play with both ardor and acuity because it’s albums like this that reaffirm distinction can be achieved without the imperious corniness of whatever confessional internet kitsch is currently vogue.
The lyricism of Bygones reciprocates the tact of the composition, but tact aimed inward:
“And I don’t want no microscope over me
They’re scrolling in and out so fast til they see
Some kind of machination
Held to the light”
Gowan expresses a self-honesty, but without the histrionic candor that’s come to characterize contemporary indie. That crafted frankness, sincere, but far from overwrought, asserts itself. I hope it becomes the standard again.
Dana Saul — Ceiling
Okay, firstly, can I say if you’re one of those people that are like “jazz is all about hitting the wrong notes,” you’re disgustingly wrong, you’re a buffoon, and you should listen to this album as penance
The freedom of free improvisation demands comfort with caprice. Sometimes that caprice resounds as dissonant chôra, arguably the conventional understanding of avant jazz, and other times it’s played as several loosely intermingling harmonic monologues. Saul composed all 40 minutes of this LP, but the 6 members of his ensemble play with the self-independence that bona fide jazz obliges. His name’s on the bandcamp, but Ceiling is comprised of six distinct, integral voices.
This album coheres with an entangling that reminds me of field recording, so many seemingly disparate aural miscellanies overlaying into an organic series. Free jazz gets slack for relying on what casual detractors would consider a desultory execution: “it’s just out of tempo noise!” There are endless examples that undermine that claim, but Saul’s composition is especially evocative.
The improvisational lilt of Ceiling does not fuddle the personal prowess of each member of Saul’s band. Even during the album’s most lackadaisical moments, the expertise of their performance is undeniable.
Daisy the Great — I’m Not Getting Any Taller
When I think about all the exceptional indie pop acts I adore, wit stands out as the most consistent stylistic similarity between them all. The Hit Parade, The Radio Dept, Camera Obscura, all sashay along a slender, flimsy line of ardency and snark. Daisy the Great seems to have figured out this dance, the result being an essential debut of 11 rambunctious tunes.
Kelley Nicole Dugan and Mina Walker, the band’s creative core, front Daisy with the astute exasperation of a classic NYC everyperson. The duo confront hapless lovers, cringe faux-intellectuals and itching self-doubt with a bluntness — somewhat goofy, but completely warranted — that I find to be absent from many of their contemporaries: “I wish I was made of cheese / so you could be plain with me.”
Near-blood harmony animates the folksy rapport between the two and the conversant band right behind. Dugan and Walker lucidly attune to each other, twirling in and out of phrases with aplomb. It’s not Louvin Brothers/Carter Family precision, not yet at least, but I do hope this band has a long and lucrative career because the two definitely have the right pair of pipes for fastidious dueting. I’m Not Getting Any Taller is a sublime start.
Cult of Luna — A Dawn to Fear
This very well could be thee metal epic of the last decade, 80 mythic minutes that make peer acts like deafheaven and Baroness sound like fuckin’ Bon Jovi (and I love deafheaven and Baroness dearly). You don’t play this album, you accept that it’s going to collide into you like an interstellar cataclysm. And, damnnn, this meteoric pulverization sounds incredible.
Composing enormity that doesn’t feel burdened by its own titanic heft is arduous for any band. Metal outfits of all veins have experienced the failure of building a domain so massive it implodes under the pressure of its indulgences. Even CoL has produced songs that are just too dense to be sculpted into a compelling artwork. A Dawn to Fear, however, does not feature these atrophied monoliths. The band heaves with each measure, conjuring an elder god calamity that would make both Catholic priests and Final Fantasy designers shriek in throes.
I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to declare the 2010’s the best decade for metal. I’m sure many Gen X neckbeards would violently pout upon hearing that statement, but there is a slew of records from the last 10 years that slay just as vehemently as 90s canon, A Dawn to Fear being the climax of the present moment.
CoL’s latest campaign decimates. You can hear a similar scourge in Winter’s Into Darkness or Weakling’s Dead as Dreams, but unlike past lesser fidelity delectus metallum, A Dawn to Fear raptures with clarion magnitude, engulfing all on its imminent descent.
Honorable Mentions
Swim Team — V
The geometric post-punk you’ve come to love, but with added emphasis on chamber melodies.
Lunacy — Age of Truth LP
A hypnagogic synthesis of dream pop, dark ambient, and industrial electronics.
Lee Fields & The Expressions — It Rains Love
The RnB legend, a true American master, still at it with another elevated soulwork.
Eight Carl — Carl
Probably the most exciting instrumental math rock band on the scene. Frenetic, muscle-spraining arrangements.
Dominique Fils-Aimé — Stay Tuned!
Gorgeous reflections on the North American colonial legacy, at times reserved, and at other times, revolutionary.
