The Best Album of 2022
~~Hey! The year is not over yet. If anything pops up in December, I will amend this article and make it clear where the additions are.~~
update (01/01/2023):
Most "Best of 2022" lists were fucking awful, the definition of echo chambers. I thought Ann Powers' list nice as I genuinely had not heard many of her selections.
I have added sections on Lizzo, Ghost, "Pink Dolphins", Paul Cohen's "Soprano Summit" and SZA.
This has been the best year in music in the last six years.
Alvvays' "Pharmacist" is the catchiest song I've heard all year. Yet the album to me, ironically, is a little too spacey lyrically and relies too much on reverb sonically, which overall makes it feel a little precious. There is not a little Morrissey in frontwoman Molly Rankin, though none of the grandiosity and resulting pomposity, which, well, a head-scratcher surely, would have been welcomed. I appreciate her message on college in "Easy On Your Own?"
Perhaps the second catchiest song of the year is Phoenix's "Tonight" though you wouldn't have wanted to like it. Worse is that Ezra Koenig is great on the track. We all have had a Phoenix phase, correlated directly with our wearing hoodies wistfully observing the autumn leaves. We would prefer to forget it. But these damn hipsters keep coming back with catchy singles.
If they continue making rocking music, The Chats' audience may not get the message of "Get Fucked". Who doesn't want a "6L GTR"?
New Yorkers are too good at faking emotional attachment. Is Show Me The Body as hardcore and cool as their music conveys them to be? Probably not - but their music is. Some of the growling is Nick Cave, some Iggy Pop: "Love and respect, come and fuck with the set."
I had been avoiding Lizzo. A lot of politics surround her. Lizzo herself hasn't helped. Having now heard some of "Special", I can say she is special. In fact, with some tongue-in-cheek, I can say she's the new Beyonce. Well, non-"Lemonade"/"Beyonce" Beyonce. "Special", over "RENAISSANCE", has a specific lyrical character, delivery, and energy unique to Lizzo, absent in Bey's recent music, which reminds one of the "Run the World (Girls)" era. I'm not the greatest fan of pure pop - I feel like pop is a mentality rather than an idiom - but I've returned to Lizzo's chaotic, even violent (see "Grrrls", however comical) disco music over and over, compelled by it. So I guess I shall be looking for the sign of her next release.
I have no idea what Bad Bunny is saying in "Un Verano Sin Ti". (Well, I actually do, but for the sake of the bit...) In the borough of Queens in New York, in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, you know, that one place you care about when the US Open for tennis has arrived, someone is always, bar none, playing Bad Bunny, 90% of the time "Titi Me Pregunto". The reason they do is because he's really damn good. I love his sadder songs: "Moscow Mule", "Un Ratito", "Neverita", and his raunchier songs are just as good. There is a massive flaw with the album: only the first eight songs are strong. There are 23 songs in total.
If we understand life according to Bad Boy Chiller Crew, there are only three rules in life: 1) there is nothing like partying with the bros; 2) women are irrational, but 3) you can't live without them. Take the grimace-inducing song titled "Always Be My Baby Boy (feat. Becce J)": "I loved your toxic ways when you call me names / but you tell me cheers but(?) I stayed the same, / yo, me and you girl can live the high life, let's jump on a flight tonight, yo fuck that we can even wine and dine." I want to emphasize pretty much every song is lyrically like this. So why the heck is their music so compelling? There must be something to these Brits acrobatically leaping over club beats. Perhaps it's a little like Mudhoney's lasting fame i.e. in "Touch Me I'm Sick": around a specific image of downhome boys being boys, there's just great music. The music simply has to sound right. Their DJ TACTICS and their producer Riton lay down sample-influenced beats that the crew knows how to utilize. Nothing about the music pops out except for the fact that it sounds great in a car. And I have listened to it a lot.
The opening of Ghost's "Kaisarion" sounds like the opening of Andrew WK's "Party Hard" and Tobias Forge sounds like John Linnell of They Might Be Giants singing "I'm your only friend, I'm not your only friend..." Just four months before "IMPERA" (what's up with all-caps titles, nowadays?), we recall ABBA released their seemingly final album after their seemingly final reunion, "Voyage", which was shockingly good. What's up with Swedes making the best pop ever? Metal heads have a right to be indignant as it'll bring a lot of rock fans into the fold, though it's clear the band loves the genre - if they hadn't, the music wouldn't so clearly be a success. That being said, it's not my thing, though I like it, and even admire it. "IMPERA" is only interested in the glory that comes after the battle. I like the blood and guts of metal; I like the descent. I think that's why the album works so well though - it's a crazy thing that metal, more than any other genre of music recently, sounds far more hopeful and cheerful, even as it finds an optimistic bent in the devil being ever present.
"Good morning kisses: giving you all mine. Pull back the curtains: show me the sunshine. Needing this coffee, needing this nature, need it right now, it can't wait until later." I've enjoyed Angel Olsen's "Big Time" more than her other releases since "MY WOMAN". Her gift for lyricism comes from the country artist's ego. So goes the chorus for "Ghost On": "And I don't know if you can take such a good thing coming to you / and I don't know if you can love someone stronger than you're used to", which is succeeded by an equally strong declaration: "I know I have my own remorse; / I often overthink, of course."
I have spoken on Florist's "Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning)". Poetry is like music - more than any image, more than any idea, the worth of poetry comes from how the artist manipulates the reader's mouth. So I'm a little sad to say that I'm not all that interested in the rest of the self-titled album "Florist". Even my reasoning strikes myself as snobbery: the album, like 2019's "Emily Alone", strikes me as being about death, particularly the death of frontwoman Emily Sprague's mother, though a critic ought not to pry too deeply into an artist's personal life. I'm not happy to say that concision and range are important to art, for one reason: Sprague is a damn good writer. She's also a damn good synth artist, though that's irrelevant. So I cannot criticize her as a writer, and I certainly cannot criticize her as a person, but I can criticize her as an artist, unfortunately, which I feel I must. Which does not deter me from admiring her in spite of.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, proving I am a madman of some kind, there's something to CEO Trayle's lyricism in "I Love You, But..." that compels me to study it. You judge for yourself if there is any poetry to be retrieved from these examples: "Bitch, I love you but we can't keep doing this; / if I don't got these percocets I might end up losing it. / Bitch, I love you but you on some goofy shit; / bitch, I love you but I damn near called you 'bitch'. / Wonder why it's always other bitches on my dick, / wonder how I came straight out the trenches and got rich." "We might go fuck at my place; / we might go fuck at her place; / she top me on the e-way; / she been fine as fuck since MySpace; / she go to church on Sundays; / knew I was gonna fuck her one day; / she knows I love the gunplay; / her brother better not come my way." Then the curve ball: "Talked you right up, I spoke you - / not the type of nigga that you can even really get fucking close to."
The horn in Dream Unending's "Secret Grief" makes them sound a bit like King Crimson; in so saying, I need more horn.
I've seen Ravyn Lenae compared to Erykah Badu, but Ravyn is not as strange as Badu. "Hypnos" in hindsight was an excellent name. Lenae whispers into your ear; not insinuating, not asserting, not emphasizing a lyric over any other, makes her curiously equipped for this millenial digital world, nestling comfortably somewhere in-between the fault lines of "facts", which defines the seductive character of her singing. The exception is "Venom", its back-and-forth over the poison of an adored one yet describing indecision. I would like to see what happens when she expands her material. Not a cohesive album, but certainly an interesting album, especially for a debut album, it's wise to keep a close eye on this artist.
How does Ka keep releasing good music? He flexed not one but two solid albums this year. "Woeful Studies" and "Languish Arts" are excellent additions to his oeuvre, whose theme is the beauty of the soul and mind in a wounded body. They're distinct. At this point, you're wondering why the hell he isn't more popular. Get him in the Wu; Ghostface: "Where the hell's the RZA?"
What is so supremely funny about MJ Lenderman discussing Michael Jordan's famous flu game against the Utah Jazz in "Hangover Game", concluding that - it has to be - it was really Jordan having one too many beers the night before? Why is it so funny when he sings "I bought fake Jordans / they weren't even shoes"? Why is it then devastating when he sings "It's hard to see you fall like that / though I know how much of it's an act / in this tables, ladders and chairs match / where all things go" in "TLC Cagematch", or "I had it under control, / I had it under control, / and then it snowballed / and rolled and rolled and rolled / and I don't have control anymore" in "Under Control"? What's going on? Is it that Jake Lenderman tapped into some hitherto hidden vein? Or is it a little like the playful jabbing and sighs of John Prine and Iris DeMent's duet in "In Spite of Ourselves": "In spite of ourselves / we'll end up sittin' on a rainbow. / Against all odds, / honey, we're the big door prize. / We're gonna spite our noses right off of our faces; / there won't be nothin' but big old hearts dancin' in our eyes." Or Jack Clement's cursing that "Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog"? Whatever the precedent, that combination of charm, humor, pathos and lyrical talent, updated to the peculiarities of our modern existence, is nothing to scoff at. This is a really good album.
I swear I heard of Loraine James before, on some other project. Her musical intellect and voracity resulted in the self-titled "Whatever the Weather", a befitting name. The opening track, "25°C", perhaps is meant to evoke an autumn's misty morning. Winter arrives in "0°C", but the music does not slow to a standstill: the music somehow evokes icicles, the condensation of one's breath and the play of light in the morning and in the afternoon. "2°C (Intermittent Rain)" is almost alien, as if depicting less the misery of an indoor day and more the melting world the cold rain distorts beyond one's window pane. This is a wonderfully creative concept album, where, gasp, the concept is actually realized.
It must've passed by my radar due to the long opening. Anteloper's "Pink Dolphins" is indeed as bizarre and colorful as the title suggests. The droning synth in "Inia" lasts for a minute, but Jason Nazary's subsequent drumming is hypnotic. Jaimie Branch herself on the trumpet is irresistible in "Delfin Rosado", and her muttering of "We are not the earthlings that you know / it really makes you think, yo / it really makes think, yo / it really makes me drink, yo / it really, really, really..." in the slow, druggy "Earthlings" is mesmerizing. May her spirit ascend, then.
There have been not a few albums this year mixing traditional instruments - brass, strings, keyboard - in a traditional, classical context with intentionally artifical, electric effects. I can think of none better than Duval Timothy's "Meeting with a Juda Tree". The piano is the sunlight striking that flowering Judas while the effects are the changing of the seasons. Timothy convinces you of the tree's vulnerability and its determination to outlive pain. (I discovered only now Timothy is credited on four tracks for "Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers". Oh bitter irony.)
"Every fear, / every fear that I have, / I send it to Pompeii." That famous city has rewarded Cate Le Bon graciously for it. Cate Le Bon is, well, idiosyncratic. And always interesting. "Pompeii" is my favorite full-length release of hers; her voice and her oddness pop out of the music, full of memorable lines. The other great standout is in "Moderation": "Picture the party where you're standing on a modern age; / I was in trouble with a habit of years, / and I try, / to relate."
Oren Ambarchi is having a good year. "Ghosted" and "Shebang" are two opposites: heavy and light, powerful and playful. Both are wonderful instrumental pieces.
By chance I caught Paul Cohen playing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a guitarist whose name I unfortunately did not remember. In Gallery 681, he played Ravel's "Bolero" on the sax, which was an incredible experience. The saxophone, as an instrument, has been tinged in my mind as powerful and romantic, its proponents Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Sonny Rollins and the late Pharoah Sanders. I either have not heard a saxophone played so gently and slowly, and so innocently, or I simply had not allowed myself to see it. Most "classical" music - or, music played with classical instruments - are bores; in our postmodern world, no one is interested in the orchestra's ability to tell a narrative through music alone. I sleep through so much new music because the composers have a contempt for entertainment or entertain through obvious ways. Cohen's "Soprano Summit", with Allison Brewster Franzetti on piano, is delightful. Much of the album features different composers, so it coheres largely through his good taste in music and his love for the source material. Much in the same way Makaya McCraven's "Universal Beings" surprised me, "Soprano Summit" is a modern updating on classical music. It doesn't possess the weight of the classics, but it is interesting and playful.
If I had more time to listen to SZA's "SOS", it might have catapulted to the top of the list. It's entirely possible it competes with the top two. As a critic, I have to be aware of my biases. The content is not immediately my thing. Whatever were my thoughts, I was seized, on the second listen, by the lyrics of "Kill Bill": "I might kill my ex - / not the best idea - / his girlfriend's next, how'd I get here? / I might kill my ex, / I still love him though, / rather be in jail than alone." Then: "I get the sense it's a lost cause, / I get the sense you might really love her." The succeeding songs are just as strong. Hand on my heart I haven't heard "Ctrl" yet. SZA's great power is in her conversational lyricism, knowing exactly when to put specific details to focus our eyes and return the material to a greater theme. Her other power is singing ability that allows her to treat any material correctly. Oh, and the sensibility to do so. However, the album is 23 songs long, totaling to 68 minutes - a third more than Fiona Apple's "Fetch the Bolt Cutters", which shares the emotional character and varied nature of "SOS", though "London Calling" is 65.
What a sleeper Lynn Avery & Cole Pulice's "To Live & Die In Space & Time" is; I did not think much of it when first listening to it. "Ambient" sometimes means "slow", or, on its worst days, "repetitive". So I thought of "Belt of Venus". Perhaps the skidding drum track, like footsteps, or the beating of an immense heart, interested me enough to want to enter the song. Around the 40 second mark a trumpet finally guides you through the belt of Venus, in the laziest and best way, accompanying you on a stroll through that golden planet's clouds and occasional storms. "Plantwood (Day)" depicts the journey of a plant, through the trumpet, breaking through the soil, with a murmuring synthesizer in the background recounting the cycles of day and night, the scarce keys of an ebony-and-ivory piano daybreak itself. I think I am in love with the EP now, having had so many months to plant and grow a seed inside of me. There is something in its breathy trumpet thrumming with life juxtaposed to the synthesizer, whose digital nature somehow mimics the photons of light.
A funny thing happened on the way through 2022. Given the drought of 2020 and 2021, I would have said that Elvis Costello and the Imposters' "The Boy Named If" is the best album of 2022. Pretty early, huh? Going by the criteria of those earlier years, it was simply a very listenable album. Yet now knowing there are strong contenders, I can look at it with a relaxed relativity. The album's main issue is that Elvis is a little old. The album's main strength is that Elvis finally rides his age. His material, even from the precocious age of 23, is still suitable for him, but, in my view, he never adapted it properly. Where his famous early ones, "This Year's Model" and "Armed Forces", were revved-up jerk-off send-offs, here he addresses the issues of sex and boredom with a jagged edge, though age hasn't completely removed him of his insecurities. The only weakness is a physical one: because of the rust in his voice, and the density of his verbiage, he doesn't connect or emphasize words as well anymore. "Farewell, OK" is a lovely way to convey annoyance at an unknown someone. The title track has its narrator arguing with the ghosts of his imagination. "What if I Can't Give You Anything But Love?" is, well, very Elvis. "Magnificent Hurt" is grandpa's way of saying that maturity can occasionally be immature. "The Death of Magic Thinking" elaborates on Elvis's bemusement over women, in the voice of a narrator recollecting a series of events many years later. And the ending, "Mr. Crescent", has grown a lot on me. In hindsight, the best Costello tracks have a bit of magic, a bit of romance, a bit of adventure in them, almost in pure spite of the tedium it is mocking; yet never too much, and never on their face. I like where he is now, and I like his work with The Imposters, which includes Steve Nieve, a consistently good collaborator of the maestro's.
And now, the four contenders for album of the year.
Rachika Nayar's Heaven Come Crashing
I thought I knew what Rachika Nayar's "Heaven Come Crashing" was in the first minute: another ambient-electronic track. Then the music subsides into silence, and enters a lullaby. The entrance of a guitar is the invitation for fantasy: much like Sam's dreams of flying in "Brazil", the dream is not a residence in itself but a portal to some kind of better self.
Often electronic music is used to critique. I think immediately of Deathprod's "Occulting Disk" and Vladislav Delay's "Rakka". This year we had the Yorke-Greenwood-Skinner trio The Smile for "A Light for Attracting Attention" and some other dance-oriented records I didn't care for that were certainly critiques of a kind. I've never cared much for that side of electronic music. Well, not entirely: I've always been interested in Gerald Donald and his Dopplereffekt and Der Zyklus projects. The interesting aspect is the fantastical aspect - actually, that's probably the only interesting aspect of music in general. Whether Donald is establishing a fascist technocracy or Derrick May is constructing a futuristic dancefloor or Phuture is depicting the human soul geeked out of its mind, the commentary always comes after the concept.
Nayar's music is a critique of a kind. There is a dreamy quality because humans only dream. We are sleepwalkers who never really arise to being actors. On the other hand, she is indulging in our fantasies and attempts to find in them a space where we transcend.
It's that damn guitar, really, that is the thin line where reality and fantasy meet. The guitar is an instrument of carnal desires; there is something about the tugging of the strings that mirrors the constant heartbeat. Yet that heartbeat in itself flies when we come to thinking about the object of our desires. "Death & Limerance" is a clear example where we are kept constrained to the music through the guitar, yet are free to wander in the ambient landscape surrounding it.
"Heaven Come Crashing (feat. Maria BC)" is another excellent example; in the latter half of the song we may be dancing to the drum track, but our mind is girded onto the guitar, lest we collapse at the end.
"Heaven Come Crashing" is a soundtrack to something. Going by the cover art, it may accompany something as melodramatic as finding love at the edge of death. Normally we ought to sneer at such dreck, but here the concept is actually quite realized; in this too Nayar finds a space for our most heightened, even if irrational, emotions to thrive.
Sam Prekop & John McEntire's Sons Of
Who doesn't like The Sea and Cake? The Chicago band - Sam Prekop (vocals, guitar), John McEntire (percussion), Archer Prewitt (guitar, piano, vocals) - is always a thrill to listen to. But if I could comment - this will surely offend someone - I would call them "white rock". Some may delicately say "yacht rock". Nevertheless, it is a type of string-percussion music that would be categorized as rock if it made your hips shake. As it stands, the "rock" is rocking your head back and forth as you nap on your porch. And, to clarify, I think they're great. I don't have so much energy to expend in a day.
McEntire himself is the drummer and recording engineer for Tortoise, another excellent band famous for "Millions Now Living Will Never Die" and "TNT". That too I would call "white jazz". Yes, not even the addition of Jeff Parker made the music less sedate. I would say their music is more hallucinatory and spacious (read: postmodern) than is typical of bombastic gut-bucket jazz. To clarify: I think they're great too.
So when Sam Prekop and John McEntire recorded an album, I thought it would be in the same vein as their more famous projects: something relaxing, something in the vein of John Cage, well made technically and creatively, and ultimately forgettable. I was right in all but one.
"Sons Of" is not rock nor jazz. It is the birthchild of both: techno.
The album almost toys with being another Sea and Cake / Tortoise song with the bubbling fount of synths in its first minute via "A Ghost At Noon", until the drum track kicks in. Almost like the guitar in "Heaven Come Crashing", which acted as the window between reality and fantasy, that drum track is reality kicking in; instead of permitting us into fantasy, however, the drum keeps us grounded while a million little details pass us by: the arc of the sun, the change in the calendar date, the piling of dust on our work desk, the movement of the clouds. Nayar's guitar invited fantasy into our minds; the drum track is the rhythm of our feet as we go along our daily walk.
It's fascinating how much of a divergence this is from Prekop and McEntire's other oeuvre. I think it comes down to the absence of the guitar. As I said above, the guitar mimics the flutter of the heartbeat. It is crucial to Aerosmith's "Back in the Saddle" and Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again"; it is the sound of adventure. Heck, even Robert Johnson understood the sound of the guitar meant it was time to get a-walking. The absence of the guitar means there is nothing new to see. But the drums are an invitation to dance - how are you going to have a dance track without drums? Where Sea and Cake and Tortoise were sedate aesthetically, Prekop and McEntire accept the sedateness as the album's intellectual concept and makes metaphysical fun out of it. Perhaps the track names are visions that one has when one is extremely bored: imagining a ghost in the pallid afternoon night, believing the river one is crossing is the Rubicon, the exceptional yellow hue of a dress alluding to a supernatural creature of Lovecraftian mythos, and a literal sense of ascending at night, as if one was in a shitty show about UFOs.
The most consistent and same-y artists create the most delightful surprise by taking the route of consistency and tameness. What a surprise, and gift, indeed.
PUP's THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND
When I recounted my favorite albums of the 2010s, I said, "Everyone is angry, only PUP admits it."
I don't think anyone expects anything from PUP. I don't think PUP expects anything from their fans, considering Stefan Babcock begins "THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND" (BEST NOT FORGET THE ALL-CAPS, FUCK-FACE!) by saying, "Show me four chords, it should be enough to make something that nobody wanted." I think everyone expects PUP to be "that noise band", Babcock being "that singer that screams and complains all the time."
But you would be dead wrong if PUP doesn't expect anything from themselves. And you would just be flat-out wrong if you dismissed them.
This is the best album they've ever made. It knocks the socks off of whatever is called rock or indie or alternative nowadays. And the fact is, they've been getting better every album since 2016's "The Dream Is Over", a classic ever since "DVP" was in "Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator" and earned the approval of the "Stranger Things" kid.
"DVP" (to be forever remembered infamously as "that Dream Daddy song") has that memorable opener: "Your sister thinks that I'm a freak; / she's been ignoring my calls, / we haven't spoken in weeks." That's a story in three sentences.
The "DVP"-like opener, "Totally Fine", meets it with the chorus: "Lately I've started to feel like I'm slowly dying, / and if I'm being real, I don't even mind / whether I'm at my worst or I'm totally fine." Which is to say, the band has finally begun to actually smirk in all of their misery. Yes, as miserable and nihilistic as that sounds, it doesn't compare to the narrator of "Familiar Patterns" taking Jell-O shots until he passes out. The music even slows down from its hardcore-esque pace with Babcock singing, "I've got all I need / except a way to sleep at night; / pushing through the deep, I've got all I need, but still..." He's at least admitting there's a problem.
And then, like the maniac he is, he makes fun of the problem with the sing-along "Robot Writes A Love Story", where he pretends he is a robot falling in love, only to foam at the mouth in this extremely memorable, extremely catchy verse:
"Black Hole Sun"
on 102.1 FM,
I think I'm gonna self-destruct if I
ever hear that song again.
That's probably my favorite verse of the whole year. It begins the album's themes on memory, self-reflection, as a result of self-automation, and the human body breaking down just from the sheer pressure of living, which would be analogized in the breaking of his guitar in the anthropomorphized "Matilda". Where the first half of "Relentless" is Babcock sneering at his memories of the band slumming as garage punk rockers and the hypocrisy of his truly wanting fame, the second half of "Relentless" is pure disintegration, the evisceration of that ego and compliant behavior, chanting "FUCK ALL THE DREAD, / IT'S ENDLESS. / FUCK ALL THE DREAD, / IT'S RELENTLESS." But no one's calling PUP the voices of a generation.
Babcock picks up the concept of self-failure again in "Habits" with the beautiful imagery of this scene: "I'll let you try and contain / all of your life in cardboard boxes, / I keep repeating your name / walking around in that empty apartment." I like to believe it's ambiguous whether he's speaking of a loved one or himself in the first two lines. Our beloved punk band employs a drum machine to great effect, portraying the human body crumbling apart into pieces physically and glitches mentally. His scream in the chorus is half a cry: "But I don't change, I just push right through." The song is full of scenes: "Oh, count your regrets / to the time of that leaky faucet," "And I thought I would love the spotlight but / it only made me squint," before clenching his teeth, "I don't change, I just push through it."
He admits he continues falling back to coping mechanisms in "Cutting Off The Corners", realizing that he knows no one in the audience and that his misery has no answer but that of himself. Not that the album is just about Babcock; as "Grim Reaping" shows, "It honestly seems like an art / how we keep tearing ourselves apart; / it's only grim reaping. / We divide / and obsess / where there once was a flame in our chest." The reality is, everyone's life plays out like a PUP album, only no one admits it.
A note on the last song. In the live EP "PUP Unravels Live In Front Of Everyone They Know", Babcock notes: "This is a song we've been playing for half this tour, and crowds are kinda iffy on it; sometimes people go off on it, sometimes they don't, we really don't care. We play this song selfishly, the four of us believe this is probably our favorite PUP song. I hope you like it, otherwise too fucking bad."
It's the sound of the year crashing into pieces, and two-thirds of the calendar hadn't been finished yet. The guitars duel over who can reach absolute, blood-spilling, fire-hot calamity first. Babcock yells, with his reddest face, a big meaty vein in his forehead, "I THINK I'M GONNA BLAST OFF!" thereupon Zack Mykula, the drummer, beating the cymbals with a massive bicep playing as Thor. The walls around you nearly crumble. "TOO OLD FOR TEEN ANGST, TOO YOUNG TO BE WASHED! / IF THAT'S THE HAND THAT FEEDS I MIGHT AS WELL JUST CUT IT OFF!"
A lot has been said about how funny these lines are: "Oh, so you're selling insurance? That's so inspiring; / give me two more years, let me know if they're hiring." And the Nikes Babcock sold were the ones Rosenstock bought online.
It's the epitome of a PUP song. Maybe not the best, but it has that combination of humor, drama and killer hooks you expect from the band polished to the sharpness of Hanzo steel. Most of all, it has such extreme contempt for everything: the audience, the business, and especially the band, who are beggars of their audience and managers while deriding them.
Because PUP has always been personal. And Babcock has always been a great songwriter. I hope no one has neglected that. You would get touches of intimate details in "The Dream Is Over" in-between existentialist dread. "Morbid Stuff" would be the album where Babcock painted pictures of his ex-girlfriends going to hell, kissing someone's snotty lips in freezing weather, and of a "reaper / waiting in the tall grass / feeding off the fever." "Morbid Stuff" actually has stories in it. Who'd-a-thunk it?
So I'll reiterate again: Everyone is angry, only PUP admits it. For that, I'm submitting them for greatest rock band of the year.
Bladee & Ecco2K's Crest
So here we are, the album of the year. And I am not even sure if it's a joke.
An unassuming album was released in March, whose cover was a red barn in a nondescript bucolic setting framed in a circle of jagged waves. "Crest", a collaboration by Swedish artists Bladee and Ecco2K, produced by Whitearmor. Never heard of 'em. Going by the aesthetic, it's some precious millenial thing.
Even Bladee's own fans were unsure about the ultimate result. "I’m just kind of tired of the fairy pop music stuff they’ve been releasing pretty frequently," a Redditor said. Another reasoned, "Maybe it's just a cultural divide because they're Swedish and I'm from the US, but I don't get how it's hip hop." Fans attempted to defend their artist by saying that previous releases were definitely rapping-oriented, which I can confirm to be true. Whatever is the case, this is a complete misdirection from the Bladee's usual oeuvre. "This shit makes me feel like a dinosaur. Not shitting on them or fans but whoooosh."
They should be right. I would be inclined to think they were right about the album's direction, especially in light of Bladee's later 2022 release, "Spiderr". It's so very hard to take seriously Bladee's auto-tuned voice singing "Here comes that feeling, you should never let it go / Caress that feeling; that feeling, ye" over what sounds like the theme song for television show Martians. It is all so reminiscent of the annoyingly retro, vague and fey music of Magdalena Bay which seems to encapsulate the ephemeral and ultimately nihilistic thought process of an average millenial.
Suddenly - no really, "Suddenly, everything engulfs me, suffering isn't anymore; go wash over me, shining like the sun; white light cover me, in this world and her majesty, no more of reality", Bladee breathlessly sings, as the Martian sounds cease and a single clap keeps beat; then the music opens up. The first thirty seconds really were the mouth of a whirlpool.
"Crest" never makes sense. Bladee coos, Bladee croons, Bladee raps, Bladee sings, Bladee, in "Yeses (Red Cross)", cries "BAH! BAH!", but it's all nonsense. That seems to be the point. The auto-tune was in hindsight a wise choice, as his voice really - no, really, unlike the many artists who claim to use auto-tune intelligently - becomes another instrument. Don't bother trying to make sense out of it; it's basically Dada.
"Crest" is a collage of sound. It's not like Ecco2K and Whitearmor are slapping a plank of wood or scratching plastic products to achieve certain effects in the music; the music is simply very good, engaging rave music. In fact, it's nonpareil, constantly shifting rather than sticking to a particular groove, yet with Bladee acting as the conductor of affect. The music follows him in wherever his introspection takes him, much like Louis Armstrong leading the rest of the band. This is an elevation of electronic music, where on one level Bladee's voice merges with the artificiality of his environment, and on another level where aesthetically Bladee seemingly - key word, seemingly - understands that his verses "must be as ignorable as [they are] interesting", otherwise the eye focuses on either the verse or the music. This is not unlike the effect MF Doom achives in "Madvillainy".
This is all a little ridiculous to ascribe to the luminaries of Drain Gang, but I'm not sure what other words to use. Where others attempt to capture this era by stating their thoughts, Bladee is the thought put into physical form. He is the aesthetic end of a thread Frank Ocean began in "Blonde" and Kanye in "The Life of Pablo", that sense of the singer swimming through music. It's that good. And, to reiterate, I'm not sure how much of it is a joke.
The closest comparison I can make to the second track, "5 Star Crest (4 Vattenrum)" is Burial's "Ashtray Wasp". Yeah. Each of its five sections are of interest, and of musical complexity. It's arranged in such a lovely way. It begins with Bladee singing in a girlish whisper "My mind lies like a strike of lightning" - again: how serious is he? - engaging in a bit of solipsism, then entering a track of bubblegum pop where he reduces his voice into a fairy warble naming uncertainties, then above a dramatic, twinkling Touhou-like piano track he raps about the emptiness of existence, to be succeeded then by an interlude involving an organ and the faint sound of someone crying, then for a track opening with Bladee boasting, "Beauty is my drug, I'm the pusher," (great line by the way), "We think we exist, that's why we suffer, do we, nah; sweep the treasure, that's the poison, baby; give it to me raw, death is beautiful," before the music opens up to, well, how else to put it, the sounds of a cotton candy heaven, finally ending in a muted track where Bladee is reduced to muttering. What absurd, self-serious, grandiose musical epic have you made lately?
Perhaps "Faust" and "Yeses (Red Cross)" are a little weak. What coheres is the trio's aesthetic vision of making music about the mundanities of life and finding ways to elevate it through the sound of the rave.
"Girls Just Want to Have Fun" is the soundtrack to a car ride down a neon-lit "Blade Runner"-esque cityscape, ending in the singer crashing into heaven. And how fitting it transitions into "Heaven Sings", where, if you were unsure of Bladee's commitment to the music, you must be prepared for complete uncertainty. He seems genuinely earnest in his search for heaven - his singing "Me, I dream of life; have that dream every night," I think... I actually don't know what to think. Where people say music makes you feel unsayable emotions, this is one of the rare cases where it actually does.
I really shouldn't like this album, because I get the sense it makes me look like a fool. But this is how it stands: I am in love with it, and eight months has not made that feeling of love abate. Perhaps its best virtue is its complete sincerity. People are always afraid of looking stupid. People sing about wanting to transcend and be better, but you know they're really holding back; by their music they're here on earth and they like being here, they just wanted to let you know that every once in a while they have lofty thoughts. Bladee made an earnest attempt here, and, rather than looking like an Elijah, he looks like the fairy people call him. It's all the more magical that Bladee and his cohorts Ecco2K and Whitearmor prove, then, that fairies and magic do indeed exist.
The year
The albums here are tied by the concept of contradiction; sonically they are bound to the idea of artificiality.
This is a genuinely fascinating idea in the digital age, something I haven't observed in the 2010s. Where I had noted that the 2010s struck on the topic of identity, 2022 addressed directly the medium that caused this sudden introspection: the internet. In all my four contenders for best album, there is some use of synthetic sound in the music, yet incorporated in a way that does not point directly to the sound. Three of the albums were firmly in the electronic genre. The one composed with drums, guitar, bass et cetera. had a theme on digitalization ("Robot Writes A Love Song", "Habits").
This is wound up in the theme of contradiction, where all four albums evoked everyday routines distorted through electronics. This is especially true for "To Live & Die In Space & Time", which merged synth and brass. But besides the music itself, the matter itself reflected this theme, particularly in "The Boy Named If" which chased after things that are imagined (and my guess now is "The Man You Love To Hate" is in some way referring to Boris Johnson). Florist explored the idea of the realms of the living and the dead, and Angel Olsen delved into the topic of loving and yet being unable to return that love back. "Shebang" and "Pompeii" were in effect encapsulations of mania, moments of being excited while lethargic at the same time. Much of the humor of "Boat Songs" comes from Lenderman's tenderness in describing "bro" things. Indeed, there were sometimes contradictions between the lyrics and the music itself, most clearly demonstrated in Bad Boy Chiller Crew and Bad Bunny's art, mixing sensual music with explicit references to sex ("Moscow Mule" being the clearest example).
Because these are quite contradictory times. My understanding of the word "contradiction" may be stronger than others': in boolean logic, a contradiction is flat-out false, always. The reality is, no one knows what is or is not a contradiction - we are not given a world of mathematical propositions, after all - but we feel we do. While the cataclysmic clash between truth and untruth is persistent throughout every age, it is extremely relevant now because of the enormous ease of communication brought upon by the internet.
Art is taking up these contradictions on their own merit, unattached to other, more important matter. There is an examination of the "truth" behind the smallest things we do and believe, and for some there is an acceptance that we may simply not know everything. But accepting our not knowing is a step forward. Indeed, Alvvays' "Pharmacist", which kicked off this article, accepts this ambiguity as one of the mysteries of life, important regardless of how minor it may be.
In all this, "Crest" addressed the internet and the Pandemic, which I didn't think anyone would do successfully within the first three years of its outset.
I'm going to tuck in this observation, not really a critique, at the end. I've observed a running away from this theme - music that is so hermitic and stripped-down so as to be implying the construction of a literal safe space that naturally rejects outsider interpretation. Or the artist explicitly telling the audience that they in no sense can be judged. Well, I'm a critic. Kendrick Lamar's "Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers" was extremely off-putting because of this quality. Other albums that were quite interesting but too sealed off were Beyonce's "Renaissance", Alabaster dePlume's "Gold - Go Forward in the Courage of Your Love", Beth Orton's "Weather Alive", Weather Station's "How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars" (Tamara Lindeman sounding so much like Joni Mitchell I did a compare-and-contrast with "Hejira"), Sudan Archives' "Natural Brown Prom Queen", Grace Ives' "Janky Star", and Jockstrap's "I Love You Jennifer B". Those are my thoughts, anyway - musically I found them all to be interesting stuff. They're someone's favorite thing. They're just not mine.