The Best Album of 2024
update (02/03/25):
Entries have been added for Rosie Tucker and James Blackshaw.
For this re-review, I went through NPR's list, Bandcamp's and Ann Powers'. I sadly did not have the energy to go through niche genres like jazz; Brooklyn Vegan's looked interesting.
The listening process for these end-of-the-year stragglers different from my usual year-round process. Throughout the year, I let albums sit for a while. At the end of the year, I literally shotgun through them, arbitrarily deciding when I'm done. Because I know ahead of time how bad the decision-making process is, it's easier to just leave albums behind. I basically know that tasting so many records at once will ruin the taste of each individual one. It's such fucked-up thinking, in hindsight, but I only have so much time.
But the process has its perks. I think I would have ignored "Imaginal Disk" in the second pass if I didn't have to directly confront how unique it was, among its competitors. I would have said, "Oh great, more of Magdalena Bay's precious shtick." But after listening to a lot of albums that didn't draw my attention, its preciousness is interesting, and says more about me than it does about the music.
Perhaps my perspective has changed from the confusion and general fart that was 2024, but annoying is good. We're at a new place in history, and the more obnoxious a genre of music is the more it likely reflects someone's actual feelings about the world we live in, thus pointing to where new veins of expression lie.
As awkward as the analogies of "Imaginal Disk" are, Mica Tenenbaum is still constructing new ideas in today's weird fucked-up digital environment. It's something.
Thus I'm somewhat inclined to move Bladee's "Cold Vision" up, but...nah. I'm still mad "Crest" is my best album of 2022 and will likely stay that way until I die. (It was really validating seeing Bladee work with Charli XCX. That's also a sheer "how did that happen?" moment.)
In a startling contrast, I have no desire to write about Mannequin's Pussy "I Got Heaven". This seems like the type of album I should like, but ... and it's weird to say this ... it lacks danger. I can't put my finger on it, but it's a reminder that the music, above all, is important. To put it quaintly, the music needs to fuck me up. You can't just play fast. Like, Black Flag can play fast, because Henry Rollins is charismatic as hell and is screaming constantly. And even then, Black Flag thought that shit got old fast with the latter half of "My War", which is super underrated. Which is in stark contrast to Rosie Tucker's "Utopia Now!", which is an album I would normally ignore if she hadn't said "I hope no one had to piss in a bottle at work / to get me the thing I ordered on the internet", which is a fucking crazy and great line.
As always, I'm going to review the end-of lists of publications (ex. search "best albums of the year") and update this list, but there's a caveat this time.
It's a given that every year is accompanied by different tastes in music. People hardly stay the same, though, if they do, then the ground beneath them certainly does not stay still. There will always be solid foundations to my tastes in music, but I'm unlikely to be seized by the same concept or song every year.
This year, the whole "talk about a song a week" thing burned me out from a lot of music. I found I didn't listen as much as I used to, probably because the act of listening to music reminded me I had to write. Besides the pressure of the deadline, the songs I listened to - and I listened to them over and over in an attempt to understand why I loved them - stole all the oxygen from other songs because they're earth-shatteringly good songs. This doesn't help one of the requirements of this list: I only write about albums I want to write about. There are albums I like, but I can't think of anything to write about. I might recover after December from the song-of-the-week burnout, and then earnestly review and re-review 2024 in January before truly getting to the final edition of this write-up.
It wasn't a bad year, but there were less "what is this?" moments as there were in 2022 and 2023. That being said, as I collected the songs for this article, I found there were more exceedingly strong albums than the other years. Interesting data. Don't know what to make of it.
It's funny that Bladee of all people asserts "ONLY GOD IS MADE PERFECT".
And it's also just as funny that Robert Smith "knows that my world is grown old" in "And Nothing Is Forever". I'm no Cure aficionado - I've sampled maybe three albums - but "Songs Of A Lost World" seems to resemble "Disintegration" (1989) a lot, particularly in its melancholy and pondering tone. Normally I'm highly cynical of nostalgia, but, uhhh, I fucking love "Pictures of You". It's kinda OK if The Cure comes back because they've occupied so many lanes in modern music that for them to do anything is a breath of fresh air. (Now I just want to talk about "Closedown" (1989), which has those perfect lyrics I still remember like five years later: "I'm running out of time, / I'm out of step, and closing down, / and never sleep for wanting hours, / the empty hours of greed, / and, uselessly, always the need / to feel again the real belief, / something more than mockery ... / if only I could fill my heart with love." NEXT SONG OF THE WEEK THEN.)
Though I'd like more robust lyrics, Hovvdy feels like they're tapping into a unique vein of expression on their self-titled album. What shall we call this? Shoegaze blues? Bluegaze? Oh god, shut up.
You know Shaboozy's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)"! It's played everywhere! In bars (duh), on the radio, in your supermarket. You don't mind it because it's a great song. Did you know "Where I've Been, Isn't Where I'm Going" is also a solid album? "Once I pick up speed, ain't no catchin' me," Shaboozy asserts with a steely gaze. In another, "Ain't many that are built like me, / I'm the last of my kind." Not true. Flat-out wrong. He's going to be the first of something.
I just love how chill Billy Strings is on "Highway Prayers". Lots of bluegrass albums come and go, and many are really good, but I feel genuinely comfortable in this album, even when he despairs in "In the Clear", which has the beautiful couplet "I aim my moral compass but it's spinning like a wheel, / and you could take that many different ways."
"Espresso"? Drake, "Hotline Bling", push away. "Please Please Please"? Drake, "Hotline Bling", "that's right". I generally dislike modern radio because, writing-wise, they're no different than Instagram posts. In an age where artists mine through the past for everything - pop-punk! synths! - Sabrina took the only gem worth taking: that art is not real, we are free to reinvent ourselves through it. So, besides SZA, she has the best lines I've heard on the radio all year: "I know I have good judgment, / I know I have good taste, / it's funny and it's ironic / that only I feel that way." Precisely.
Yaya Bey's "crying through my teeth":
Back when I was broke, I was good at telling jokes, like, "Hey, Mr. Joe, you want to hear a joke?"; see, I got all this money, and I'm still fucking broke, 'Cause a nigga paid her taxes and put her daddy on a boat; through the sky, he in heaven, remember every word he spoke, like "Never trust these niggas, all these niggas is a joke."
Great verse. In my head all year.
What the hell is going on in Brazil? I didn't mention that last year, DJ K's "Panico No Submundo" was one of my favorite electronic albums. This year, I see its counterpart in DJ Anderson do Paraíso's "Queridão" and NTS's compilation album, "funk.BR - São Paulo". I can't say much on the songs as I don't understand the lyrics, but the music is, well, creepy, or sullen, but in a way that makes you still want to bop. This makes me think of Boisvert. This is some fascinating commentary on modern times if I could wrap my head around it.
"Niggas know they wouldn't watch no ... Star Trek episode." Did 1010benja stutter because he was struggling to come up with a punchline or is that just him? Same here on another lyric in "Peacekeeper", of the album "Ten Total": "'Ventually I wanna stop drinkin', smokin' Marijuana, / but for now I'm like, Changa, changa, changa, changa." "Twin" makes me think he has every ability to be the next Drake, not in his capacity to be an asshole, but in his ability to blend rap and hip hop and flip the game on its back.
I'm suspicious that Adrienne Lenker is more interested in the ideas rather than the writing in her songs. "We could be friends," Lenker sings, struggling immensely to finish "friends", continuing, "You could love me through and through. / If I were him, / would you be my family too?" I've never really liked Lenker's music all that much up to this point, but I'm beginning to get it. "Vampire Empire" begins "Watching TV tired, bleeding on the bed, / the milk has just expired, all the leaves are dead", Lenker wails like a banshee. I don't mind being her "Fool".
Beth Gibbons' "Lives Outgrown" is a sleeper. It burrowed in me indifferently and now I like it all the more and more. I thought she was doing the acoustic thing a lot female singers her age do (and I'm not trying to be sexist, that's the truth!). Where were my ears? She brings on the menace, the rage, the loneliness of her Portishead-singing days. These are not songs necessarily about her, though they are reflections on the shadow she casts by a merciless sun.
"Ha, ha, ha," you may be saying, "Mr. Popular Thoughts, you must feel pretty mixed about Kendrick's late-year release of GNX, after beefing with him?" You know what, Antonoff merchandizing '80s music works extremely well with Kendrick's new-but-really-weird grunting style in "Squabble Up". I guess one could call this Kendrick trying out a new persona. I wouldn't call it the best rap album of the year - "he's alluding to his best album of the year" cough cough - but I like it for the same reason I like "DAMN.": K.Dot is actually honest about being an asshole and isn't pretending to be a good person. Because, y'know, everyone in the world is trying to be a good person, though we seldom tell people about our efforts. When Kendrick is actually mean, he reveals his actual struggle to be a good human being, rather than the struggle he wants to show you. That's why "GNX" is good. 2.5-to-2 now (haven't heard "Section.80"). (See, this is how much song-of-the-week has poisoned my brain: why is there no write-up for "HUMBLE."? At least for the music video alone? The best acting between 0:59 - 1:14 where I could talk about each individual member of the choir singing "Bitch, sit down?" Fuming.) Here's a funny thought that's less true than it amuses me: is this Kendrick's "Yeezus"?
I'm getting the sense I'm too old for love songs. I don't feel the intense yearning of youth. So it was a surprise to get shivers from The Softies' first album since 2000, "The Bed I Made", specifically in the beginning lyrics of "I Said What I Said": "Maybe I said, It was enough; / how could I know how to fall out of love?" The band began in 1994; the singers must be nearing or in their fifties; so how do they find new veins in loving and wanting, that I've never heard before, arranged so simply to acoustic guitar? Another example: "It started with a tiny flame, / and ended in tears; / I hadn't felt that way in years." So goes a quote in my "Collected Stories of Colette" (no idea if it's attributable to her): "Love has never been a question of age. I shall never be so old as to forget what love is."
Perhaps I'm wrong, but people don't lean too much into the fantastical elements of rap as they had in the '90s. Rap is perfectly tailored for storytelling and epic poetry. Now's about the right time for it, because the times we live in are getting more and more surreal. The industrial / metal of E L U C I D's "Revelator" is perfect for this. He paints for you a feral world where men have become wolves. "Fang bite, dog breath, / short leash, pit fight, / from this height, from this speed, / downhill careening," on "THE WORLD IS DOG", "Bulletproof Giraud, Jurassic Harlem" he spits on "YOTTABYTE". "I brought a trunk full of tiny violins to the bloodletting, / I can play one on each finger for every seven bodies", billy woods mumbling "Crazy if you think you're crazier than us." Interestingly enough, the late great Alan Vega's posthumous "Insurrection" also tackles E L U C I D's madness. Suicide foretold punk and industrial music; what will we make of "Revelator"?
With strictly instrumental music, the musician runs into a lot of dangers. Some of them include: 1) the audience not "getting" it, and your having to hit them in the head, and 2) being so technical so as to lose all human connection (Tashi Dorji's quite good "We Will Be Wherever the Fires Are Lit", which deserves to be shouted-out, unfortunately possesses a bit of both). Blackshaw, in "Unraveling In Your Hands", navigates through all of the dangers expertly. What struck me is the warmth in all of the songs - there's no depiction of sorrow that comes across as maudlin, and no sense of optimism or feel for hope that comes as false. What it most depicts is an analogy to wind and light - that things must come to pass. It can be accused of being "ambient" - sure, it does remind me a bit of "The Disintegration Loops". It's more "Aeroplane over the Sea", honestly. It's gut music. Not sure what more to say than that.
Uhh, I love the supremely lame album called "Utopia Now!" Take the opening lyrics to "Gil Scott Albatross": "They're gonna turn the moon into a sweatshop, like / none of these fuckers ever heard of Gil Scott Heron, / more like Albatross". It's so...pretentious! Here, too, Rosie Tucker fails to hit the high note of "Albatrossssssss!" But none of this matters. The only thing that matters is how much Rosie believes in what they are singing, and they certainly believe in their anger / annoyance and that they're somewhat full of shit and that it's okay for them to be angry about being full of shit. This genuinely great couplet: "I know every time you sip from a bottle of piss / and remember me, the memory degrades." Here's another: "I'm not saying that you shouldn't care / but the biggest billboard in Times Square can't / fix your dad, clear the air, bring you back to me." Where have they been all my life?! Most artists treat our current times laconically, barely batting a paw to address the philosophical implications of our times; here is real wit, even when it's self-deprecating.
Wait a bit, another great Rosie Tucker verse:
I wanna turn the argument around, turn my face toward the sun and talk on common ground because we don't punch sideways, don't punch down.
I can see myself getting addicted to spoken word really fast. Gil-Scott Heron, his pauses, his hesitations, his rasps, haunt my dreams, become my own speech in the daytime, and so will Johnny Coley's too. What an apt title "Mister Sweet Whisper" is; out of the smoke and dusk Coley arises, mumbling, talking not in revelation but in a head-scratch, hanging around in his sweatpants. Goes a verse in "They're Dreaming Me":
We deploy elaborate, unspoken civility, these bodies wrapped in cloaks and scarves, coats and hats, swerve, offer even more space than the space that's already there, nimble footwork, inclinations of the head, and the hat, polite reduction, and dulling of the eye, not quite seeing, certainly never looking at that other body, that creature, like you, moving away, suddenly marking the movement with exaggerations of the elbow, the extreme and sudden folding unto itself, of the knee.
This is the best poetry. When a poet tries too hard to instill meaning into their words, a la the verses you'll see in the New York City subways, the poem almost stops being poetry, it stops being real, it becomes just words. The only good poems are the ones that are almost not even worth talking about, when the poet treats the subject with such indifference that we're puzzled he doesn't see what we see. It's somewhat unfair, because of my literary background, to even put spoken word records here, but I absolutely want "Mister Sweet Whisper" to continue whispering into my ear.
So now we move onto the contenders for the best album of the year, whose songs I have put into a playlist.
DORIS' Ultimate Love Songs Collection
Like Bladee's "Crest", I don't know whether to take "Ultimate Love Songs Collection" seriously or not. But that's why it's a great album: it's playful. These 50 songs total 49 minutes. They are sample-riffic like Dilla's "Donuts". DORIS lays the autotune so thick he sounds warped, he sounds fucked-up. He serenades you with his vulnerabilities. "You don't have to pretend, you ain't bulletproof," he says in a forgiving way to an unseen third party. "Close Friends", on an upbeat sample: "I'm like, PayPal, ya boi, / I'm pissed off, annoyed." "Overzealous" sounds like it's on a sample of Hootie & The Blowfish's "Only Wanna Be With You". You can approach anxieties in two ways: long, winding stories, or in scattered thoughts. DORIS takes the latter route, which Joyce took for "Ulysses". Here he gets lost in a kaleidoscope of emotions, past and present, that you want to sink into too.
A nutty way of looking at "Ultimate Love Songs Collection" is that it's Dilla's "Donuts" for Millenails. There's the aforementioned Hootie & The Blowfish reference, then there's the "Lovefool" sample on "Bricks", preceded by the frantic clicking of the mouse. It's certainly a good interpretation, but that can't be all. There's also the spoken word. In any other genre poetic expression would be used, which poetry, unfortunately, gets in the way of meaning by its floweriness, its abstractness. With rap, there is no such pretension, and in having no pretension, having only sincerity, it comes back around to being poetic, like a grungy - err, grungier - version of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass". "I had to ride it, / don't want to hide it, / she not goin' to catch it, / I had to let it, / you're not gettin' it, / it's your decision," on "Rock Out". Later, "Repeat the same stuff, / stay the same us." That he sings in warbles too means he is not even sure of his own feelings, or that he senses that time will even wash away these passions. Doesn't this get to the matter of love and living deeper than most other art does? Isn't this what music is supposed to be?
Actually... if one thinks about it... the lyrical approach most resembles Death Grips'. Hear me out. Both DORIS and Death Grips overwhelm the singer with instrumentals, such that the instrumentals almost compete with the singer as a vocalist. These are perfect analogies for the times drowning out every conversation; our human speech is foregrounded by the troubles we are going through. The lyrics are afterthoughts. But in that same sense too, the music becomes about survival. Yes, what I am saying is unimportant compared to all the other shit going around me, but I'm still here, my voice is still here, darnit.
I love "Ultimate Love Songs Collection", but I sense my ability to comprehend it is lacking. It's a bit like talking about a jazz record or Dilla's "Donuts" - what do you say? Do you go through every track? How does one describe a feeling? So, I will lay the subject down for the time being. If you want to know what "Ultimate Love Songs Collection" is about, you must listen to it yourself.
Kim Gordon's The Collective
Kill Yr Idols indeed. Very early on in one's study of artists, you learn, as brilliant as they are in their artistry, they're not very intelligent in anything else. As I was learning about the Smashing Pumpkins' "Siamese Dream" last year after, of course, coming to admire it greatly, I found out that Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth fame (come on, that's why we know her), dissed the Smashing Pumpkins as not "punk rock" (2015, "Girl in a Band"). Sure, Kim. It's a reminder that she and Thurston sought to be arbiters of all things cool during the early-mid period of Sonic Youth. Wanting to be cool is not cool, I think is very clear. Fixating on labels? Yeah, nerd obsession. Whatever, dork.
It's funny how the chain of cool goes, because I used to dislike Robert Christgau (the subject of "Kill Yr Idols") from his tepid review of "Daydream Nation". It's natural for brilliance to hate brilliance, it seems. The sun strives to be hottest, no other star it allows near.
Because that's what Kim is: brilliant. I think once Sonic Youth split - and the Moores, divorced - you found out where Kim and Thurston actually lied. Thurston, despite his love of Branca, seemed to be responsible for the softer, more melodic side of Youth, evident by his solo work. Let's say "Candle", from the aforementioned "Daydream Nation", is his. Kim is the one who embraced the ugliness and artiness of the band; she's "Eliminator Jr."
Kim's "No Home Record", especially "Paprika Pony", and her work with Bill Nace in Body/Head, are eye-opening. She has a peculiar eye for the beauty of, well, noise. Her work with Youth honed that particular skill, such that she doesn't rely on Merzbow-ian levels of noise, but understands the dynamic between silence and sound. Which is why, I think, she gravitates toward hip-hop (beyond her clear proximity in the past, as with LL Cool J and Chunk D in 1990's "Kool Thing"), whose fascination with the boom-bap beat, as familiar as the heartbeat, as the head-bang, is beginning to converge into a black hole of beat-just-for-beat. She has a good instinct for why trap music is actually liked, beyond its historically violent connotations: it is an adequate description of the noise and madness that go behind life's speed, confusions, lack of answers, on par with Steve Reich's "Come Out". The pain of the drug dealer is everyone's pain, as far as means and morality go. The menace never ends, it just subsides, sometimes.
But her cleverness truly shows from how funny the record is. Let's just start with "I'm A Man", which can be read as a political thing, maybe, even though Kim moans, "It's not my fault I was born a man; / come on, sweets, / take my hand, / jump on my back, / 'cuz I'm the man." Subsequently: "Pass me a black napkin, please." Maybe I'm not the demo Kim is aiming for, but it's so hard not for me to laugh at this...inanity! It's even harder when Kim angrily says, "It's not my fault I'm not bringing home the juice," which I've never heard anyone say before. This could be the greatest troll attempt I've seen an artist do recently, and I suspect it is, given Kim's background in avant-garde art. The artist is not choosy when it comes to their means of provoking a response from their audience, and this is as provocative as it comes, supposedly challenging toxic masculinity while offering up...stereotypes? straw-men? things that don't exist but some people believe do? It's a wonderful track that, to me, is on the line of being serious and absurd, ending in Kim muttering, "You got your Audi, / you got an Audi, / it's not my fault."
"OK", you may be saying, "you could interpret The Collective as secretly being hilarious, but one example does not a theme make." I turn your attention to "Shelf Warmer" which, I think, is my favorite track on the album. The introduction of our titular hero, the shelf warmer: "Did you get it / at the gift shop? / Did you get it," Kim enunciates with menace, "at the gift shop, huh? / It's a shelf warmer, / warmly, / given." At this point I'm dying, and I think I'm finally dead by this exchange: "That's what you want? / That's not what I want. / That's not what you want? / That's what you want? (That's what you want?)", said with incredulity, "That's not what I want. / Return policy. / Gift receipt."
I think "The Collective" meteorically shot to one of my favorite albums ever that you can listen to in two ways: seriously or humorously, on the same level as Steely Dan's "Gaucho". It's way funnier than a Weird Al album.
For example, if you listen to opening track, "BYE BYE", for your first time, you may be seized by the violence of the drums and the glitchy synth. They convey darkness, anxiety. You may interpret Kim's lyrics as her going through a depressed state. Then, on second listen, you really think hard on the lyrics: "Buy a suitcase, pants to the cleaner, / cigarettes, for Keller, / call the vet, call the groomer, / call the dog sitter." Then you wonder: What the fuck is going on?
This is how noise works: you see whatever you want in the patterns, but the artist is the sculptor, their hand has an indelible impact on your interpretations. Depending on your mood of the day, or how you approach the album on a listen, you can find it mirrors your own inner turmoil or find Kim in her tongue-in-cheek way struggling to describe her mess of a life, and share in her miseries. This is an incredible line to toe and she fucking nails it.
I think multiple artists have opted for Kim's approach - Alan Sparhawk's "White Roses, My God" is the clearest, most interesting comparison - but Kim succeeded in that the music feels adapted to her unique voice. There are not merely interesting ideas here, there is mastery of these ideas.
I think, of the former members of Sonic Youth, Kim is the one carrying the torch. She's really testing the limits of dissonance, as far as music, lyrics, down to vocal performance go, because dissonance is punk as fuck. She definitely found one of its summits here, and she did it without pumping the volume.
Charli XCX's Brat
Imagine me stunned here listening to Charli XCX's "Brat" wondering what the hell to write. Every option is a bit crass. I could mention the de-fanged state of pop - the current "nothing is sacred" attitude, therefore nothing feels dangerous - but that seems a disservice to Charli whose album should be the primary focus of the write-up. I could talk about the emotional content of "Brat", but I don't know if Charli would want the conversation framed that way; after all, the album is incredibly danceable, as we expect from her. So...what do you say about an album that is so many things at once, and is almost about nothing? You instinctually don't, and instead simply listen to it. That's how good "Brat" is. Here's another dimension of its greatness: Melon and I actually agree on it.
I will say this: a lot of artists tout their international credentials. "I've been around the world" et cetera. But the world is, after all, below our feet always; we are always part of the world. Charli exudes that experience, even if it has brought her no wisdom. "Brat" begins with the lyric in "360", "I'm your favorite reference, baby, / call me Gabriette, you're so inspired". "Talk talk", "Talk to me in French, talk to me in Spanish, / talk to me in your own made-up language." "Von dutch", a reference to the American fashion brand. Then there's "Apple", where she's getting onto another plane. Only Charli has that voracious appetite for life in its purity, to see and experience things, regardless of their meaning. She doesn't care a fig for meaning because she spends so much of her life doing it.
Which is what "Brat" ultimately is: Charli living her life, making wry observations as in the aforementioned "Apple": "I guess the apple could turn yellow or green, / I know there's lots of different nuances to you and to me." If you're familiar with Charli XCX - great pop musician, better electronic artist I think, which makes you wonder where her fucking ceiling is - there is little dramatic and grandiose in the instrumentation this time around. This is her most Kraftwerk/Daft Punk-y. This pleases dorks like me. The minimalist arrangement has the effect of enhancing the sweetness of her music, by focusing all attention onto it.
Charli's music has always possessed the feel of being retro, but nothing about her music can be called regressive; rather, for her, "past is prologue". There's the brag "I went my own way, and I made it". "Drop down, yeah, / put the camera flash on, / so stylish, / baby tee is all gone; / drop down, yeah, / looking like an icon, / work angles, / yeah, 360." The peculiar attribute of the lyrics is not that she has done, and will achieve; rather, Charli has always and eternally been, depicting herself as a force of nature. This is the impeccable virtue of a woman who lives constantly in the present, and feels capable of anything. She can take "retro" sounds and adapt them to her own voice and time with ease.
That might be why Charli's music vibes - am I using this word correctly? - so much with younger people i.e. people not me: in our difficult present, where many, many kids struggle to fit in, she relies on 2000s sounds not to evoke comfort but to use as a mirror to understand her own mind, to try to understand how she became, from the kid who posted music on her MySpace page, the person she is now. A lot of people have tried their hand at this, but Charli's the only one who constructed with this aesthetic in a way that doesn't feel precious or coincidental. It feels like an actual monologue that she, and by extension her audience, might have. This is an incredible feat of skill. This is like juggling twelve pins on a unicycle with a book balanced on her head while reciting Hamlet's "sicklied o'er", on a tightrope, over a tank of cannibalistic sharks, though the sharks really don't contribute to the "skill" part of this analogy, do they.
To be clear, I don't love all of "Brat". I listen to the first half a lot. I find the latter half of an uneven quality or lacking harmony between the tracks. I love the idea of "Brat" though. "I might say something stupid" is like the ultimate internet story. That suffices. "Brat" wins its ideas.
I think the highest praise I can give for "Brat" is that it feels like a continuation of Madonna's oeuvre. To clarify: countless of artists have tried to emulate the Queen of Pop (well, one of the queens), but no one matches her in charisma, and no one matches her in ear. It somehow happened that Madonna sung on immensely danceable songs, and it somehow happened that she added more than enough oomph on those songs. This is "Brat". This stinks of a woman knowing exactly what she's doing and that she's fucking good at it too.
As much as you can read into the autobiography of "Brat", the album ends on "365", a reprise of "360". Here, Charli lets the album, and in analogy life, descend into madness, which hopefully comes out in the end as ecstasy. No more words need to be said. She has become the incarnation of partying, and thus has returned to simply living her life.
Charli has expressed that she has an awkward existence in the world of pop. I retort, What world does she have to live in but her own? With the creation of "Brat", like a messiah descending from the heavens, hers is the only party people are heading into now.
Jessica Pratt's Here in the Pitch
There's a bit of joy hearing, in the opening drum in Jessica Pratt's "Life Is", the drum intro in Jesus and Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey", itself taken from the Ronettes' "Be My Baby". It means the elusive troubadour is going down stranger paths yet.
It's been a long route for Pratt. What sticks out from her debut, self-titled album is her dream-like writing, and from there she obscured more and more of the music. The first thing she shrouded was her voice, adopting a singing style half-muttering, half-groaning. There is the tape hiss pervading the backgrounds of "On Your Own Love Again" and "Quiet Signs". Not sure what's up with the recording of "Quiet Signs", but, as I re-listen to it, the music is soaked with echo, as a consequence of the recording space or set-up, I can't say. Then there's the most substantial change for the 2019 album: composition. The songs are slower tempo, as if she felt there doesn't need to be many more words said to lull the listener into her world. That's Pratt's music in a nutshell: a lullaby, not so much an escape as a meditation away from the anxieties and distress of life. From this, revelation may come. Or, not. I had always held her art in high regard, but I also felt it didn't add up to anything more than a unique aesthetic. The choices were too conscious to be precious, but, as a listener, the music simply did not stick.
That is, until I heard "World on a String".
Here's the key difference between "Here in the Pitch" and Pratt's other albums: progression. It's not so much her music lacked a chorus or a refrain, but beyond the lyrics the instrumentation never indicated one. The strength of the verse-chorus-verse structure is that it allows the writer to weave several thoughts around a single theme. Take the aforementioned "World on a String", where the first verse,
She's got the world on a string, 'bout the time she comes here anyway, and it's only lasted for a while, and it's only luster for the tide
sets the scene, the bridge, "I used to want for what your desolation hadn't come by", has the singer reflect on the situation, and the actual chorus,
I want to be the sunlight of the century
reveals the singer's inner turmoil. The verse is accompanied only by light strumming, the bridge lightens up with a string synthesizer by Al Carlson and Pratt picks up the tempo, and the chorus comes crashing in with drums.
For some, song structure is not what you come for a Jessica Pratt song. Pratt has always excelled in mood. You can get wrapped up in the dreamy world of "Moon Dude" and "Poly Blue". But those worlds, after all, were dreams, static things that can't change when touched by the blushes of reality. I love that the magic of Pratt's music finally modulates, finally alters at the musician's touch. That her subjects are California hippies is all the more appropriate for her surreal canvas, where the bright light of desire meets the darkness beneath the human psyche.
That line, "I used to want for what your desolation hadn't come by"? That's a freaking beautiful line. And her soft cry to become the "the sunlight of / the century; / I want to be / the vestige of / our senses free" is such a wonderful sentiment, the darkness wanting to be set free. The form of the music must enjoy the form of the lyrics, or the lyrics stand to be ignored. We don't need to know what the lyrics mean, but we must know how the lyrics feel, and here you sense someone's desire to transcend.
I've been playing "Get Your Head Out" in my head all year. The opening organ and bass are permanently stuck in my brain. They create the atmosphere perfectly, of the feet of Pratt's protagonist running through the shadows of the early morning. Those lines, "I'd catch hell for running 'round, / as the sun's way down and poised to find, / 'cause I keep coming back to what I left behind, / and, well, you've got it bad, our sins're the loving kind," haunt my memory. Then that final "In the stars, waiting 'til love's aligned." The way Pratt sings "I" in these lines, it's like her voice imitates melting wax, depicting the candle smoldering in its desire. It's a perfect performance.
I don't know how to describe my love for "Get Your Head Out". There's the chorus: "Get your head out, start your way up, / cut along a seam of life, / there's just no time to say how, / our spirits are high." She's ethereal, she sounds like she's singing from fifty years in the past, she sounds like she's singing from a place beyond time, I don't know how to describe it.
More than the fairy songs of her previous records, the songs in "Here in the Pitch" are anchored to the present, but they're also sung by people who are looking towards the future. They are not beyond their fears, they're only trying to ignore them. These monsters lurk in the background of every song constantly. "By Hook or by Crook": "Some people chip away time, / more than they understand", "Sunk in the middle, / our crimes are just a rhythm on the west and you / argue all my life." This song notably has a long instrumental outro with the organ and Farfisa, as if certain things cannot be resolved. "Empires Never Know", "I never was / what they called me in the dark, / I never was, / here I sit so 'lone. / Antigen, after dawn, / and twilight thieves in the rain..." This is despair, but Pratt makes despair romantic, as if this defeat is a kind of victory.
Then there's the beautiful "The Last Year": "Out of luck, and out of time, / it's true the last year ought've plagued my mind, / to be the actor, to play the part, it's come to this... / Because I'm exactly what you said, / and better off than dead." "Glances" is an instrumental track, so we know "The Last Year" is the story successor for "Empires Never Know". The despair of that prior song has hardened into resilience, worldly wisdom and caution. But the optimism, sparkling like a light, that was consumed by the darkness of the world, comes out again sharper, as Pratt sings the chorus: "I think we're going to be fine, / I think we're going to be together, / and the storyline goes forever, / and the distances I can see... / It's you and me, / I've gone with all the changes in my mind." If ever there's been a sentiment needed for these dark times, it's this naïvete, bought for cheap and worth nothing, but still something we need to have.
This is a great album. Whenever we think of a songwriting album, we think of the songwriter, the songwriter singing of themself or of some character. But Pratt doesn't sing about herself, she paints. It's rare for a lyricist to find a new pocket for music to enter, but Pratt has found it, darn it all.
KA's The Thief Next Door
I will be upfront and say I do think about the optics of what I judge and write, I guess in "woke" terms. I like representation, but I dislike overrepresentation. I attempt to be fair when I know I cannot be entirely.
So the patriarchy wins: in spite of the truly great music we got from female musicians, each interesting and conveying different approaches to music, I'm giving 2024 to KA's "The Thief Next to Jesus", some nobody in a field of somebodies someone knows.
I did not think of listening to it much when I first saw its release. I thought, from the first few tracks, "This is another good KA record where he outdoes himself," and moved on. KA's output is so good his greatness is routine. I only redirected attention after his death and the consequent write-up. As I listened to it, and discovered, to my horror, I was awaiting eagerly every track, I realized I had another contender for album of the year and had to make a flurry of judgment calls having had already a few difficult rounds of choices.
I wrote about "Beautiful". I love "Beautiful". But the decisive factor is "Collection Plate", the fifth track. I focus on the chorus: "If you wanted to bless me, you should have left me that collection plate," recalling his hardships with poverty with a mixture of resentment and humiliation, resentment for the supposed generosity of religion and humiliation from being treated less of a human, in spite of literally dying in another's eyes. I then focus on the music, the low strumming of a guitar, picking pace and volume only in the chorus, and the peals of a sound I can't identify, depicting the soft rays of light from heaven with a sample of a gospel singer lightly whispering. The effect is not mere. I misunderstood the album on first listen. KA is struggling to reconcile the violence of his youth with Christ's message of mercy. So he says,
Afraid [if] I prayed too quiet, [God] wouldn't hear, so often obliged to say if I died today, I wouldn't care.
This is the contradiction. How can KA believe someone died for his life when he was so often treated like trash?
Later on, in "Fragile Faith",
Scan for evil, got some stand-up people I sit down for, the others are loved ones, just wish I was around more, in short, I was born heir, prepared for ground war, invested in the gutter, got in on the ground floor, came in rain, 'cause we been down poor.
He enters the chorus, his teeth gritted, intimidating, but to whom?
Ain't nothing shook about me but my faith, couple hundred years asking, nothing kept us safe. Ain't nothing shook about me but my faith, still do us the same, if we in the same place.
He's menacing here, but his pistol play is not just for play, to take a line from Big Boi; this is no Future or 21 Savage playing for theatrics. This is a man fighting against the demons of his hardships. Does he have real enemies? Probably - but here he admits that, while he can endure hunger, he can endure bullets, the one place he has been hurt the most is in his belief of the meaning and the inherent goodness of life. He actually sounds angry when he says "nothing shook about me but my faith", "faith" said aggressively, as if he still feels the wounds to this day. Worse, what wounds him is that life can do anything to his mortal body, but he stands unsure what will happen to his loved ones when he passes away, as seen in the introing sample of the next track, "Hymn and I".
This is a very different album. This is by no means a binary album. Rappers like to rap about unquestionable triumph and bottomless despair. At the end of his life, KA has no answers. He is relying on God at the end, the all-mysterious, all-encompassing, as he says on the final track, "True Holy Water": "I'm here for you, sweat, bled, shed a tear for you." Maybe it's because I don't listen to much religious music: I can only think of Leonard Cohen's last, "You Want It Darker", as a comparison.
But "The Thief Next To Jesus" has another theme: the history and struggles of American blacks. Take "Lord Have Mercy", which is but a piano track and a repeated vocal sample. These are mixed somewhat louder than KA, as if he is in deference to their piety, lowering his own. This humility enhances lyrics as "Found peace in the beast, now can't sleep if hear quiet, / get to sever a Nebuchadnezzar, whoever dare try it, / could speak to suffer, sleep for supper, it's a rare diet, / the government have only respect when [they] fear riot." In any other context you could feel the twinges of anger and rage in these lyrics, but juxtaposed to these samples he sounds genuinely tired, genuinely beaten, and genuinely looking for peace in his soul. At the end of that same verse, he goes, "Planned a mighty crime, so thank '99 my year hired."
Then there's even one more theme to address: KA as the battered, tired, but still strong soldier. Going back to "True Holy Water", with the same verse he sings,
I love lie, mentioned issue in school, we pull through with ten cars, if want them dead, sitting, waiting, marching in your order, just tell your man march,
he also adds,
Hair turning gray, still trying to learn away all the grim parts.
This is a man who spent all his life fighting, is ready to spend his eternity fighting, and yet doubts that even this is the true worth of existence, of anyone's existence. For what is fighting for but to achieve peace? but now, peace attained? This is the existential crisis KA goes through in these songs, whose answer we cannot know, only KA may.
I see rap as originating from spoken word; you see Gil Scott-Heron saw all around rap in 1971's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". Rap began as other expressions of black Americans did: depicting the extremes of black joy and black suffering, and the extremely thin tightrope they walked on to have both. It's not just one or the other, it's both living in intense contradiction, as they themselves lived in a contradictory America. All of this, of course, describes KA to a fucking T.
Some albums you just know are great. "Brat", "360", is great. "Here in the Pitch", "Life is", is great. Then there are sleepers. There are the ones whose philosophical implications bother you. There are the ones whose lyrics bother you. You can't put your finger on them, until you do. This is "The Thief Next to Jesus" for me. Like the Resurrection itself, it was preceded by a long period of doubt. But this is it: this is my favorite album of the year. KA kommt.
The year, and the decade so far
I would say, of the music I heard this year, 1010benja and DORIS' were the most surprising. Those are really weird, and thus very welcomed, mutations of hip-hop. Beyond that, it was just an OK year except in the sheer number of contenders of the year. I don't really know how to reconcile this anomaly.
And so, presented with phenomenon, my brain becomes fried. This is a bit like 2016's gun-to-your-head choice of "Are you picking Blonde? What about Lemonade? What about Coloring Book? Life of Pablo? Blackstar? WILDFLOWER? FREETOWN SOUND? ATROCITY EXHIBITION? ARE YOU SURE???" I'm a bit overwhelmed by the choices, each singularly great and almost not even worth comparing to one another. So, you must forgive me for choosing in order of what spoke to me the most. I was already unhappy putting "Brat" behind "Here in the Pitch" in the middle of the year, now I'm double unhappy putting "Here in the Pitch" behind "The Thief Next to Jesus". It's possible this list may reshuffle as I reflect more on it later. Perhaps.
Well, we're in the middle of the decade, so let's take a look at where we are. The '90s was the decade of filth, the '00s was a kind of "golden" decade where new styles emerged and old styles, particularly hip hop, found new vehicles of expression, and the '10s was the decade of ego. The '20s is shaping to be the decade of rhetoric, where the artist is laying aside the "I" and simply saying what their thoughts are, as if we've become, in our postmodern way, aware of the biases that come behind saying anything yet ignore the fact anyway.
You can find evidence of this weird development in all my other "best of" lists, but there are other trends to observe. Fiona Apple kicked off the decade with "Fetch the Bolt Cutters", a strongly rhetorical album. Beyoncé is the flagbearer for this movement, releasing two albums designed to provoke commentary and introspection on themes outside of the music itself. I can say whatever about my enjoyment of them, but I can't deny she has been insanely successful in getting her audience to consider the context music is made from. Compare SZA to '10s Beyoncé, and we find, where the latter once went for the gusto, the former is frequently introspecting and analyzing her actions. Bad Bunny's the same. I find, surprisingly for a big band, the lyrics of boygenius to be clinical and cold and opaque, same for Adrienne Lenker's, whom I like more.
I think this and last year are when these explorations began paying off. Did I know I needed an album about Lonnie Holley's struggles? Did I know I needed to hear about Charli's thoughts on motherhood? Did I know I needed to hear ANOHNI tell me I'm so killable, or Bladee to tell me he's always the head of the arrow? What about Billy Strings feeling existential despair while driving down the highway? Did I know I needed to hear about the contradictions in KA's views on religion, or Kim Gordon's experiences with bowling? That's why art exists, of course! We are blessed that the world is bigger.
I'll sneak this little observation in here, that may spawn its own article altogether: I poo-poo Kendrick a lot, because I like him rather than love him. But the release of "GNX" made me re-evaluate him. To clarify, I still feel "GNX" is somewhat mid except for some clear highlights; I fucking love Alphonse Pierre's review on Pitchfork, that's the most I've agreed with a review besides one of Christgau's, though a 6.6 score is kinda harsh. But I love "luther", and part of the reason why I love it is how unique the first verse of it is, where Kendrick asserts "If this world was mine I'd take your dreams and make 'em multiply". That's an unusual thing for a rapper to say, and it points to the times we're in. Kendrick's fame more-or-less follows a specific period of time that we're all living, that is characterized by political polarization, that we're still awaiting the end of and the birth of a new period (unless the world is destroyed before then, but I wouldn't bet on that bingo square, as plausible as it is). It really begins with 2015's "To Pimp a Butterfly", the same year, I think, Black Lives Matter became well-known, 2017's "DAMN.", very early into the new administration, 2022's "Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers", smack dab in the middle of the current administration and a month before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and now 2024's "GNX" with the reelection of that guy. Kendrick has oversaw this turbulent era in its entirety with different perspectives, and as uneven as his output is in my eyes I have to credit him as being possibly the most representative artist for this whole weird 2015-? period, for good or for ill. It's a reminder - and I say this with no shade, I actually saw it with awe - that great opportunities make great artists, but the other side of the idea is that only great artists make great use of great opportunities.
So, weird decade. And notice how women dominate it so far. Most men can look through the catalogs of rock and jazz and electronic music, find certain tools for their own expression, and then carve themselves a niche - but only a niche. Female expression in music is still rather new, largely because it had been pigeonholed for so long. Popular musical history for women is like Dolly Parton to Joan Baez to Joni Mitchell to Carole King to Linda Ronstadt to Stevie Nicks to Kate Bush to Liz Phair to Fiona Apple. That is, female art has largely revolved around the female voice, and I think only recently, maybe since the '90s, that voice has been able to expand its subject matter outside of torch songs. I'm lightly reminded that Christgau's review of Joni's "Hissing of Summer Lawns" caused him to remark that Joni was becoming a "West Coast Erica Jong", which, in our modern age, is a somewhat reductive statement; and, to remind you, Christgau consistently throughout his career has been a strong advocate of feminism, moreso than his contemporaries, some hiccups here and there. Thought experiment: would Charli's insecurities about having children resonated with an audience in 2014? 2004? OK, what about Fiona Apple's "Relay", an excruciating document about her jealousy towards other women? Would we call Jessica Pratt and Beth Gibbons "hippie-dippie bullshit"? Sometimes I wonder whether Kim Gordon would be as reviled as Yoko Ono, someone who is regarded as unfathomably untalented compared to her utterly impeccable, amazingly gifted ex-husband (some sarcasm in my voice, obviously), if she began her solo career in any other decade.
Which is what I have learned in the last decade of my life listening to music: music changes when the audience changes. The small fry fight for listeners; great artists find new listeners; the listeners become artists themselves, some great. As a critic, I have learned my job is not to dictate taste, it is to discover taste, and write about its contours, otherwise what I write about it is trite, boring and pointless. Thus, the power is in your hands, and you have changed the landscape of music, I would say to the advantage of women. I myself am pleased with this development in music. Let's see what the remainder of the decade has to bring.
It's worth noting what it is artists are arguing against to put into frame what they are arguing for. Since the beginning of the decade we've gone through, let's see, pandemic, war, more war, global conflict. Thus, in an environment where people perceive only doom and gloom, people have to reason that "everything is fine".
This is an interesting contrast with the '80s, the decade of rebellion - what else do you call the era of Big Black, Devo, Sylvester, Paul Simon, "Sledgehammer" and Juan Atkins? - which had a concrete enemy to contrast, defy, scream against, the "other", as it is. The '20s is relatively more relaxed in that it has little desire to fight back, which can be a stupid act if one is swiping at air. But having no desire to fight is an expression of helplessness, it is preventing focus, preventing action, thus amplifying the anxiety than quelling it. Thus the quality of Post Malone and boygenius' music, of "Welp, things are shitty but that's how the world is, man". This is all curiously devoid of the blues, I mean, an idiom where people can express their pain as a kind of acceptance of their time on the earth. There's only wallowing. The wallowing has been helped substantially by the development of "mood" music, the magical combination of Pro Tools and Autotune that nowadays comprises "trap music". But that's not the only route for this wallowing - PUP's "The Unraveling of PUPTheBand" went the humorous route. I would love it if music gained a sense of humor again. Unbeknownst to many, the '80s was really, really funny. That's another issue too: in a world where attention can be thrown at the smallest of things, no one is very interested in embarrassing themselves anymore, a la "Detachable Penis". Who knows, maybe "Skibidi Toilet" is the future.