Favorite releases of 2020
A year so bad and wretched, it’s hard to wrap your head around it. Other people have written much better and more thoughtful things about this year than I ever could. Since the beginning of the pandemic, my family has spent our time mostly in our apartment, and, in nicer weather, outside on walks in our neighborhood. Every day, with few exceptions, has felt basically the same, which is maybe why the year has seemed to pass so slowly. I have a hard time remembering the details of whole months. It’s January now, October feels like it might have happened a few weeks ago. On a household level, time has moved in bizarre ways, while on an external level, there are of course very clear events that have marked the parts of this year. Here’s hoping this year is better than last year, and we move towards a less hellish future.
I did not listen to a lot of new music this year. Part of that has to do with my wife and I welcoming a baby last January, and part of that has to do with the day-to-day psychic grind of being alive right now. The list below represents my favorite releases from 2020, presented in no particular order. There was a lot of good and fascinating music released last year, and I hope to catch up soon on the stuff I didn’t get to listen to, or missed entirely.
As always, check out other lists for more comprehensive coverage: the Said the Gramophone and Stereogum lists were both fantastic.
Waxahatchee’s “Saint Cloud” is really one of Katie Crutchfield’s best, as many have said. Crutchfield is an amazing songwriter and a great performer and I can’t help but think that in a different year, it would have been a huge year for Waxahatchee and this album, bigger even than it was. “Saint Cloud” feels as much like a whole world as “Cerulean Salt” did when it came out, and it’s thrilling to see Crutchfield continue to display both such control and verve five albums into this.
Jeff Parker is a magician. He turns tunes and melodies inside out, extracts a brightly colored tone or phrase, flips it, turns it into a shimmering mist of notes, lets it dissipate, echo, fade. “Suite for Max Brown” has many wondrous songs, but this cover of a Coltrane tune is so sweet and welcoming, a bouquet plucked from up the sleeves.
"Rare Thing" is a song that's about a dream Frances Quinlan had about her niece (when her niece was a baby). "Rare Thing" is a gorgeous and affecting song for many reasons, not least of which because of the ways Quinlan very astutely outlines the emotional experience of being an aunt or uncle to a little one. This line in particular is incredible: "Yet when I come over/I love that quick delay/before your face alights/in recognition." One of the aspects of Hop Along's music that I enjoy most is Quinlan's distinctive voice and you can hear the characteristics that make it so special in this line, the way she sings "over," there's so much depth there, with an almost hidden undertone of roughness, and it sits so well within the bright surface of her voice. You can hear it later in the song too, the final time she sings about a realization she's had via her relationship with her niece: "I know there is love that/doesn't have to do with/taking something from somebody.""Rare Thing" is a beautiful song on a beautiful album.
There’s probably no one better right now than Kevin Parker at creating swirling, protean psych-rock songs that feel like journeys. “The Slow Rush” feels like a more monolithic record than “Currents,” less approachable. This album somehow has a continuous atmosphere, but at the same time, so many of the songs, like “It Might Be Time,” have little shifts, micro-climates of sound within them, rich, weird textures, that it seems like they could never be part of a coherent whole. Parker seems like he’s really good at insanely detailed soundcraft, and like the kind of person for whom it would be really important to manufacture beautiful sonic through lines for his albums.
I listened to “Man Alive!” a few times when it first came out and thought it was boring. It seemed dark and inert. But then I picked it back up later in the spring and it clicked. King Krule songs always feel kind of earthbound and dingy to me, and this album especially has that vibe: sooty, industrial, heavy. But Marshall combines all those elements with his voice and it all turns into something emergent that you could never predict from the constituent parts. Dude is an alchemist.
Nicolas Jaar released this, “Cenizas,” and “Telas” last year, and they were all great (an insane amount of music in one year, with a Darkside album on the way this year). I enjoyed them all, but “2017-2019” was the one I loved the most. Jaar is so good at making incredible dance tunes. The whole album is wonderful and exhilarating, but “Deeeeeeefers” just kind of rips your head off. That beat. I have a vivid memory of listening to this song on one of my last bus commutes back from work this year, before everything closed down, and being amazed at the layers of sounds in this song.
A straight-up anthem. “Suddenly” is a totally enjoyable album from beginning to end, matching the heights of “Our Love,” which was a masterpiece. The music is surprising and energetic and wildly catchy, but Dan Snaith’s voice really makes these songs—in “Never Come Back,” it’s the moment around 2:07 in the song when he sort of breaks free from his dazed trance of repeating “And you never come back/and you never come back to,” to address what’s happening, like he snaps into the conversation to get real for a second: “I can never forget it/Promise me that you don’t regret it/You and I were together/Even though we both knew better.”
Soccer Mommy’s “color theory” is one of the albums of the year for me. I don’t think I spent enough time with it when it first came out (in February, basically a lifetime ago), but I’ve been listening to it probably once a week over the last few months and I love it. The album feels more intense and inward-looking than “Clean,” which seemed more focused on relationships. “color theory” has that too—discussions of relationships—but there’s a lot of rumination, examination of feelings and mental states.
The singles from this album, “lucy,” “yellow is the color of her eyes,” and “circle the drain,” are all among Sophie Allison’s best stuff, particularly “yellow is the color of her eyes,” which is a heartbreaking song about being someone’s child and wanting them to know how much you love them.
I go back and forth on this, but “bloodstream” is probably my favorite song on the album. It’s a good representation of struggling with depression, and Allison has such a great simile for trying to hold onto happiness and contentment when you can feel it going away: “Happiness is like a firefly/on summer free evenings/feel it slipping/through my fingers/But I can’t catch it in my hands/catch it in my…” Allison sings too about depression waiting for its chance to return: “But I know it’s there/swimming through my bloodstream/and it’s gonna come for me/yeah it’s gonna come for me.” Which is reminiscent of something Javier Marias wrote in the “Your Face Tomorrow” trilogy about the possibilities you carry within yourself for your whole life--to your detriment or benefit.
“color theory,” like a lot of great albums, has pockets of sounds and weird little moments that you only notice after listening to the album a dozen times. Every song is catchy and fascinating, but then after listening for a while, you also notice how well crafted and designed they all are too.
“Traditional Techniques” is such an unexpected album from Malkmus, with some truly wonderful songs, and it ends with a song that features one of his best and most vulnerable vocal performances in a long time. The way he sings, “It’s amberjack/let’s throw it back,” it sounds so valedictory and final, like some real Sydney Carton at the end of “A Tale of Two Cities” vibe. I love these lines too: “In a way, life’s impossibly strange” and “Life itself don’t miss/anything at all/that’s just the way it is.” There’s so much to love on “Traditional Techniques,” but this song is so striking.
There was a tooth in his mouth that bothered him. It felt heightened, somehow, harmonically unstable. He delayed going to the dentist for a long time, because he had no insurance, plus he was a smoker. He knew what the dentist would say: stop smoking; your teeth are garbage, etc. A few years later, after he got insurance and quit smoking, he went to the dentist to get his mouth checked out, get a cleaning, the works. ‘Bad news,’ the dentist said, about the tooth that had been bothering him, ‘this tooth is going through a change, I think your body is filling this tooth with little interior teeth.’ His tooth had a more interesting life than he did, he thought, it was still evolving, still becoming, still growing. He thought fondly of his tooth and its secret microteeth inside.
The new album from Rival Consoles (Ryan Lee West), “Articulation,” is composed of songs that start in one form and shift to another, songs that come disguised or arrive in a familiar form but contain unexpected information. “Forwardism” is a good example of what happens throughout “Articulation.” This starts as a pretty standard Rival Consoles song, something that would sound right at home on “Persona” or “Night Melody,” but right as “Forwardism” settles into what you think is a comfortable, chugging mix of delayed chords, hammered dulcimer, and crinkling percussion, the track turns into a digitized marching band, heard through a rotary telephone and decaying land lines from thousands of miles away. “Articulation” has a lot of invention in it, and it feels like West challenged himself to explore new ground and go beyond what he’d done before. It’s a great listen and the album has such a nice, compact arc.
More from the “Universal Beings” sessions, which is all I needed to hear to be psyched for this album. “E&F Sides” continues the same sweet live atmosphere that ran through “Universal Beings,” which feels especially heartbreaking this year, when there’s not a whole lot of live music happening. “Beat Science” starts with a McCraven solo/workout and slides into a rolling grove lined with harp notes and bass. It’s four minutes that could go on for double that, triple that, without wearing out its welcome.
Jessy Lanza’s albums, all made with Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys, sound like memories of 80s pop laid down layer upon layer, like a kind of confection. “All The Time” especially sounds like Paula Abdul singing over mid-period Junior Boys production (though somehow it’s a little poppier and showier than a lot of Junior Boy stuff, more along the lines of the mall-soundtrack songs in Galleria, Lanza’s project with Morgan Geist). “Lick in Heaven” has so much going on it, musically, and Lanza sings so beautifully on this track, but one moment in particular always stands out to me: I love the way she sings, “You don’t have to come around/I take it back, tears’ll fall again/oh yeah.” She’s so matter-of-fact about the sadness, like an inevitability she just has to get through.
Not sure what to say about this one other than it’s pretty unlike anything I’ve heard. Maybe like other Jim O’Rourke stuff, in a slantwise way. Symphonic sections bloom and then wither instantly, choked off by noise or silence. It’s not something that you’d listen to every day, for sure. But it’s the kind of thing you take in more and more over time, you understand more of what’s happening—like reading Finnegans Wake in little sections over many years, you start to parse things better.
The new Bright Eyes album, “Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was,” has a similar emotional tone as Radiohead’s “A Moon Shaped Pool,” but it’s hard to articulate that precise tone—there’s grief and mourning, but there’s also a sense of passing along knowledge, wisdom obtained via grueling sadness. This album also feels really close in many ways to Oberst’s solo “Ruminations,” which was pretty fucking desolate, but “Down in the Weeds” turns away from that vein of despair by offering moments of musical joy, lyrical reminders to “hold on” and “keep on going,” and depictions of love and connection.
“Down in the Weeds” is a big album. There are big sounds on this album—swelling strings, Flea’s tasteful slap bass, horns, bagpipes—and fine background sounds as well, with hammered dulcimer, Marxophone, and beautiful backing vocals on a lot of the songs. The backing vocals in particular sound so good. On songs like “Mariana Trench,” “Pan and Broom,” “Persona Non Grata,” “Tilt-A-Whirl,” and “To Death’s Heart (In Three Parts)” the backing vocals almost rise to the level of duet with Oberst, and they have some of the vibe of the songs on Vampire Weekend’s “Father of the Bride” that featured Danielle Haim.
“To Death’s Heart (In Three Parts)” especially is a beautiful song, with some grim lyrics from Oberst:
“There’s nothing left no more/To tear apart/Agonies are infinite/And sympathies just aren’t/They run out/I’ve seen that void/Tried not to stare/There’s bodies in the Bataclan/There’s music in the air.”
The background vocals on this song come to the front right when they hit the line about the Bataclan and the effect is startling—I think I’ve listened to this song maybe 20 or so times already, and every time I hear that part, it makes me want to listen to the song again immediately.
“Down in the Weeds” is an album full of intensely felt and compelling songs—Oberst, Mike Mogis, and Nate Walcott all went through intense life changes since the band’s last album, and you can hear all that in the lyrics. This is definitely a looking-back album, an album that has an underlying tone of: life is wild and tough and brutal. In some recent interviews, the band has said that they recorded a new album because they’re old friends and they wanted to make music together again, and you can tell that too. It’s a great album. It feels sorrowful but not resigned to hopelessness.
I hope they keep doing this for as long as possible. It’s such a good feeling to have a new Run the Jewels album and press play on it for the first time. You feel like you’re in good hands, no matter what. And maybe I’m misremembering what was going on when the other albums came out, but there’s always a feeling of the RTJ albums speaking to something, or addressing a need.
[BUY RTJ4]
Routine is Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott and Jay Som’s Melina Duterte. Their collaborative project’s debut EP, “And Other Things,” emerged out of time the partners spent in Joshua Tree. For Routine, Truscott wrote a lot of the material and sings lead, while Duterte accompanies her (she also wrote arrangements and did the recording and mixing). There’s a lot of the Jay Som sound on this record, and it has a similar vibe to the music on last year’s gorgeous “Anak Ko,” bright and kind of airy, full of bold sounds and hooks. But the sound of Routine is just as much about Truscott’s songwriting and singing, which has the breathy weight of Kristin Gundred from Dum Dum Girls or Hope Sandoval. Her voice is beautiful, and she uses it to great and varying effect across the five songs on the EP—from contemplative on “Cady Road” to disappointed on “Numb Enough” to passionate on “And Other Things”—Truscott sings really expressively. Like Duterte, Truscott has a gift for writing great melodies, and all the songs on the EP make an immediate impression, every song is packed with hooks and fascinating little sonic touches. All these songs also feel really personal, like letters sent off to a friend, and Truscott has mentioned that the EP is intended as a series of vignettes. It’s a tidy package of beautiful and compelling songs.
An audio kunstlerroman, a memoir, a deep self-reflection, an interrogation. “Microphones in 2020” reminds me a little of Edouard Leve’s “Autoportrait,” but less concerned with the quotidian, more concerned with the arc of life. It’s a 44-minute song and it goes by in a flash. One of my favorites this year. My daughter loves it too, sings wordlessly along with the long, shifting intro.
I love the Avalanches a whole lot and did not expect another album from them before 2035. Even with the knowledge that the singles they released in advance of “Wildflower” were some of the roughest, almost purposely annoying cuts on the album, I still balked a little at what they put out ahead of “We Will Always Love You,” particularly “Running Red Lights,” the song they did with Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo. The music on that track is great, sure, but Cuomo just sounds off somehow, like a smug robot, or an actor who can’t really sing trying to sing. I don’t know what it is, there’s some extra theatricality or artifice there that’s off-putting. My expectations for the album were way low after hearing the singles, and I was mostly hoping there would be one or two songs that were worthwhile. But like with “Wildflower,” everything, even “Running Red Lights,” makes sense within the context of the whole album. They build this cosmic elegiac feeling throughout the album, and by the time you get to “Running Red Lights,” it’s actually an affecting song. The one I keep coming back to, though, is “Overcome,” which is just shatteringly beautiful. “We shall overcome, my love/We’ll overcome some day.” It’s the kind of song you need to hear in a year like 2020.
Pierre Rousseau was one half of Paradis, one of the great groups of the last decade (see here, here, here). He and Simon Mény released a handful of blisteringly great singles on the Beats In Space record label, an EP, and “Recto Verso,” a fantastic album that still feels underrated. The band broke up with a perfect record of releasing nothing but great music.
Now Pierre is on his own, and he’s releasing “Musique Sans Paroles” on Beats In Space Records. Six instrumental songs that were inspired in part by the “naive spirit of early music making.” “Paris,” the gorgeous early single, sounds like that—it’s easygoing, it’s joyous, it sounds like it was fun to make. For fans of the sound of Paradis’ music, there’s a lot to love about this track. Cushy synth sounds paired with whispering percussion and strong melody. So many little sonic touches on the track too, little pockets of noise sewn into the lining of the song. So happy to hear the spirit of Paradis continue on.
AceMo makes hard, weird dance music. “System Override” has the playfulness of some of the stuff on Wah-Wah-Wino, but it’s way more rough-and-tumble, big sounds, sharp corners. “Wee Ooo” is propulsion, like internal combustion propulsion, heavy, mechanical, heat-producing. The whole thing is a wild ride and a thrilling listen.
Joe D’Agostino is better than almost anyone at writing elegiac songs that don’t feel maudlin or manipulative. I think it’s because his lyrics are so focused on specific details. He does such a good job of activating emotions through concrete details. In “Emerald,” which is one of my favorite songs on the album, there’s a great example of this early on, in the scene-setting beginning verses: “They used to smelt lead here/Trapped in this sprawling dream/Glow, emerald city.” For someone like me who grew up on the East Coast, those lines immediately evoke the kind of desolate landscapes that I’d see from the windows of SEPTA and PATH trains near Philly and in north Jersey. And later on too, these beautiful lines: “County fair/Woodwind band/Never let go of my hand/I’ll have to sometime/Let’s leave it for awhile/Hope our hearts halt softly/It’s all been a gift/The crescent sun shadows/In the solar eclipse.” That captures a type of fleeting micro-thought, ineffable shit that would take pages and pages to spell out, in the space of a few lines full of well-placed detail. D’Agostino is an amazing writer, and the Empty Country album is one of the best things he’s ever done.
Just to add a little to what I wrote before: “Marian,” the first song on the album, and “SWIM,” the last song, are both incredible. “SWIM” starts with this arresting first line: “Got a tattoo/on my ribcage/of the second plane hitting.”
Phoebe Bridgers’s “Punisher” is a stunner. The album feels simultaneously like a singular, personal expression and like it’s in dialogue with a lot of other musicians and albums. Like other brilliant lyricists, she has an incredible knack for picking the specific, concrete detail that evokes whole worlds of sensations and memories. She’s also filled the album with a strong sense of place—bits of L.A. and California all throughout the songs. (The line in “Garden Song” about Pasadena—”they’re gluing roses/on a flatbed/you should see it/I mean thousands” is so good, that almost afterthought placement of “I mean thousands” at the end of the line).
“Punisher” also seems like Bridgers picking up things she’s loved over the years and transforming those elements to fit her vision. She’s mentioned in interviews how much she loves Elliott Smith’s music, and how she doubles her vocals on some tracks as an homage to his use of the same technique. There’s “Savior Complex”’s little pockets of strings and pedal steel that bring to mind early Bright Eyes. One of the best examples of this is on “Kyoto,” one of my favorites on the record, which features a stone-cold Beulah trumpet line running throughout the whole song, a trumpet that sounds like it could have come straight from Bill Swan circa “When Your Heartstrings Break.” So unexpected, so good, it fits in the song perfectly. So besides being an amazing songwriter and lyricist, Bridgers is an expert at deploying little bits of musical texture and references from the last few decades of music.
Bridgers did a fascinating video interview for Spotify recently where she talked about the best advice she’s ever gotten, and she said that Haley Dahl, her bandmate in Sloppy Jane, said “your greatest ideas are your jokes,” the idea being that ideas that start off as silly hypotheticals end up becoming, over time, honest expressions or compelling ways of working. “DVD Menu,” the first track on the album, seems like the result of this kind of process—it’s so right on, the exact type of music that would be looping in the background while you get ready to hit play on a movie. It feels like a joke, and it is funny, but it also sets the tone so perfectly for the record.
What else is there to say but that the Clientele covered a beautiful song (by Shack) beautifully and released it on Bandcamp in the middle of a horrible year? So many of their songs offer a portal to another world, and it’s no different with this cover, either. The world of the Clientele features the following: swallows diving for insects above a big open grassy field at sunset; stars in the sky every night, always visible, always portentous; pleasant drizzling rain; empty—but not menacing—streets; elms, birches, willows; fallen leaves; winding forest paths. The band conveys all this usually through Alasdair Macleans’s lyrics, but even here, with a cover, they transmit their Clientele atmosphere through the music.
Sofia Kourtesis’s self-titled EP was one of my favorite releases of 2019, and she’s back with the “Sarita Colonia” EP this year, four new entertaining tracks. The songs on “Sarita Colonia” are inventive and dynamic and kinetic like the tunes on her self-titled EP, but these show a little more personality, maybe slightly more revealing in some ways. Mostly, I think, because of the vocal snippets that Kourtesis has embedded in a lot of these songs, playful, teasing, and unexpected. I love when an artist kind of digs a little more into themselves and their aesthetic—when they make the kind of music only they could make, or the kind of book only they could write, or the kind of film only they could direct, etc. i get the feeling that’s where Kourtesis is at, where she’s headed. I love the vibe of the title track, which has unstoppable, river-flowing energy, but I wanted to highlight “Akariku” because it’s so enjoyable. Simple chirps, claps, rushing vents, then a voice enters with some polite advice, the percussion starts in earnest, and a bigger voice starts singing. It all opens up as it moves further along, a sweet synth pulse, some chiming notes, a remark, “Mmm-hmm, yeah,” a woman’s voice setting the scene, and then, out of nowhere, a bright snippet of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” threaded into the track. Beautiful. One of four fun tracks on a great EP.
This live recording of two new GY!BE songs might be what I listened to most this year. The band played both “Glacier” and “Cliff” when I saw them a few years ago in Tacoma, and it was transporting. “Glacier” is amazing on its own, but “Cliff” feels like something new for GY!BE. It moves differently from most of their songs, built on big, lurching bass riffs. Here’s hoping they record and release these two soon.
Women released two stone-cold classics: “Women” in 2008 and “Public Strain” in 2010. Their sound revolves around the biting, abrasive guitars of Chris Reimer and Pat Flegel, the adventurous rhythm section of Michael Wallace (drums) and Matt Flegel (bass), and P. Flegel’s zoned-out, detached vocals. They found a combination of fascinating post-punk sounds and poppy melodies that allowed them to move between roaring, dissonant experimentation and tight, graceful tunes (often combining these two modes within the same song). Everyone in this band was insanely talented and brought a lot to their sound, to the shapes of the songs. They broke up a little after “Public Strain” came out. In 2012, Reimer, an amazing musician and incredibly inventive guitarist, tragically passed away.
The good news that Flemish Eye and Jagjaguwar were reissuing “Public Strain” for its 10th anniversary was accompanied by even better news: an EP of rarities would be released as well. “Rarities 2007 - 2010” contains five unreleased (or rare) Women tracks, all of which are of the same high quality as the existing album tracks. “Everyone Is So In Love With You” is probably the track that differs the most from Women’s LP work—the main sounds are cello, acoustic guitar, and Flegel’s faraway, haunted vocals, and it has the feel of a Parenthetical Girls ballad. “Everyone…” points to what might have been a different direction for the band, and actually sounds pretty close to what Flegel has ended up pursuing with the Cindy Lee project. “Bullfight” came out on a split with Cold Pumas, Fair Ohs, and Friendo, and feels like classic Women, launching with Wallace’s drums and Matt Flegel’s rolling bass, and unveiling the sharp, wiry guitars of Reimer and P. Flegel. It’s angular and restless—it’s got the feel of a Television song, a kind of spiky, beautiful, effortless song. “Service Animal” is another gem, with dry, whirring guitars and Pat Flegel’s declamations echoing in the background. This is a good example of something they did so well—marrying disparate sounds in a way that seems like it could never work, but in their hands it all gels so well. At first blush, “Service Animal” seems so off-kilter and wild, but you listen to it just a couple times and the melody is stuck in your head for the rest of the day. “Grey Skies” is probably my favorite song among the rarities, it’s up there alongside “Venice Lockjaw” and “Eyesore” as one of the band’s most gorgeous songs. It’s all graceful, neon-bright guitar lines and Pat Flegel’s reverbed, 50s vocal-group crooning. It has such a sinuous, surprising melody. The EP closes with an alternate (extended) version of “Group Transport Hall” from “Women,” and this version probably surpasses the album version—it’s slower and heavier, and the extra heft fits the song well.
“Rarities 2007 - 2010” is essential for any fans of the band, and even if you only ever heard “Black Rice,” these songs are absolutely worth your time. It’s a shame that the band only ever recorded two LPs—who knows what they would have done if they’d kept going. I’m thankful we get to hear a handful of new songs from one of the most inventive guitar bands of the last 15 years.