The Best Album of 2021

Continuing a trend from 2020, 2021 is a continuation of: 1. the increasing retro-looking sounds for "alternative" music, 2. the dominance of older bands (who actually still have a vision), and 3. the solidification of the dominance rap has over the mainstream.

On 1), Makaya McCraven and Madlib made pretty satisfying albums ("Deciphering the Messengers" and "Sound Ancestors") with the former taking inspiration from Art Blakey and The Messengers. Snail Mail sounded like she was ripping off the 90s in "Valentine", and in our social current numerous hip-hop artists called back to their "ancestors", which, to paraphrase Roy Wood Jr's "Imperfect Messenger", is a bit of a bitch.

Of course jazz can be forgiven for looking backwards; lots of winners in jazz come from a new interpretation of an old song. This axiom was proven again this year with Darius Jones' "Raw Demoon Alchemy", especially in the exceptional track "Love in Outer Space". It was also refreshing to see Mach-Hommy break through in "Pray for Haiti" with a no-frills rap style, considering what passes for rap in the mainstream today. Otherwise the retro sound was pretty annoying, there being no real attempt to actually bridge the past with the present, moving more towards the present than to the past. Even Turnstile's "GLOW ON", which was pretty satisfying, didn't have any new tricks for the listener.

On 2), Low's "HEY WHAT" was pretty darn good, and I was drawn to it multiple times throughout the year. KA doesn't really count since he's been making music for a while, but "A Martyr's Reward" is darn good too. Nick Cave's "CARNAGE" is interesting. Grouper's "Shade" is pretty good. These are the artists who may have an old sound but are at least interested in expanding the material you can use with that sound.

Honestly, an infinitesimal amount of music I listened in 2021 actually came out that year, continuing a trend from 2020. Maybe it's just a sign of me getting old. Opera has been a huge influence over me this year. I also just finished Michael Azerrad's "This Band Could Be Your Life", and Mission of Burma's "Vs." and Fugazi's "The Argument" are, like, the biggest things in rock in the last 40 years. Those are actually inventive and worthy of reviews... someday. And Big Black's "Atomizer" still kicks ass.

I also had a retrospective with JAY-Z's (why the all-caps, Jay?) "4:44", also worthy of review. Marvin Gaye's "Here, My Dear" is the weirdest pop record ever made; one can conclude it's a work of genius (maybe not a work of art, though). I dipped into Philadelphia soul through Billy Paul and The Intruders. Oh, and this is the year I heard Sonny Sharrock's "Guitar", which has to be one of my favorite albums of all time, a masterwork in, duh, guitar (though Sharrock famously said he didn't like the guitar).

All in all, it was a pretty lame year for modern music. I heartily enjoyed Overmono's "fabric presents Overmono"; it is a dance record, though; take it as a dismissal or whatever, as you will. Xenia Rubinos' "Una Rosa" was quite fascinating, but I hadn't heard it all the way through yet.

The winner of the year is Dream Unending's "Tide Turns Eternal". It was simply the most listenable album of the year. This follows a trend with me from 2018: the albums that won were simply the most listenable, and not the most exciting. (2018's "Universal Beings" from Makaya McCraven, 2019's "ANIMA", Thom Yorke's thing, or 2019's "Hectic Shakes", Christoph de Babalon, and 2020's "Stateless" by Tashi Dorji.)

Perhaps I'm getting a bit cynical. I'm pretty tired of the heart-string pulling in modern music. I think this has to do with musicians reacting to the cynicism of our time, with social media and society and blah. But their reacting doesn't abolish the cynicism; it's just a reaction. So who gives a shit?

I'm no expert music guy, so all I can really say is that I most like music that changes shape multiple times within a minute. A specific pattern or a specific rhythm connotes ideas; shifts in patterns connote a theme. The heaviness of some of the ideas in "Tide Turns Eternal", subsequently lightened by the succeeding ones in the shoegaze sequences, really does convey the theme of a dream. We all know dreams, of course; they're half-nightmares, half-what-the-hell-is-going-on-ness? The tension never lets up in "Eternal" because you're not sure whether you're going to be launched into the nightmare or float back onto the stream of the dream again. If we were to really analyze it in this sense, this album is a better fitting commentary of our times than others, which loudly announced their intentions - there are the Sault albums and that album by those MacArthur geniuses or whatever, which are, furthermore, flat-out boring. "Tide Turns Eternal" better encapsulates that sense of indecision, that lack of control people feel in our modern day.

But I bet Dream Unending doesn't give a shit. Or, if they had these thoughts, they were minor. I would bet that these feelings are typical tropes in fantasy/sci-fi to begin with, and Dream Unending realized them while going through metal's conventions and subsequently elevating them. I bet the band just had fun - they had ideas before, refined through time and practice, they got together and further refined those ideas. This seems to be the process of veteran players who just naturally work hard. I mean, fucking "Bitches' Brew" and "Ascension", for god's sake.

It was a shockingly easy album to ease into. Usually on first listens, I remark on the characteristics of first tracks and think them through: the things I admire, the things that just don't gel, and the things that annoy me. For "Tide Turns Eternal", I just listened. I think the first track "Entrance" is a bit pretentious and doesn't really transition to the rest of the material (most "intro-only" tracks are bad), but once "Adorned in Lies" kicks off you get submerged in it. The track "Dream Unending" makes me think of Godspeed You! imitations, in that the spoken word is a bit pretentious, the narrator sounding like a bearded wizard type. But the songs transition seamlessly from one point to the other - the final, titular track, "Tide Turns Eternal", has a spoken word of a female singer, whose performance reminded me of the hallucinatory ending of Swans' "To Be Kind", also a title track.

In short: it's a good album.