Best albums of 2010s, again
I already did this but I didn't do a good job that time, so let's try again. In any case, some of my entries have changed.
2010
It goes to Deerhunter's "Halcyon Digest". Some of these entries I do think I've written well on, and I think the "Halcyon Digest"-focused essay is not bad, but why not write more about it? I think if a work of art is truly great you can always write about it, because you keep finding new angles.
It really comes to that bum-bum-chk of the opening track "Earthquake" that gets me. Usually I get annoyed if an album takes too long to establish itself, and yet there's something about the tension between those bummmmms and that harsh chk that keeps me waiting. When the strings enter the band achieves an effect like ambient music: a sculpture of sound is being created and I want to see what the band builds from it. Once Bradford Cox enters in his wail the album comes into focus: it's as if the band were building a house of forgotten people and long-held sorrows.
But is this correct? Is it a sad album? It isn't; "Sailing" is the one that is aesthetically the saddest - low tempo, largely acoustic, very wistful - but it's not a document of sadness, it's a document of existing. Most of what Bradford is singing about are the details on the sea and assurances to himself that he's going to make it out fine.
"Halcyon Digest" is a treasure box in this way: the more tracks are unveiled to you, the more you come to comprehend the architecture of the band's specific melancholy. It's Bradford's cracking "Take my hand and pray / with me" in "Helicopter" that really gets you; in the first line he is begging for someone, and in the second there's that stress on "with me" that seems to denote how much the singer has depreciated themself. "Halcyon Digest" is a bog of low spirits and bad days and uncertainty, but it still fundamentally believes in the power of another human's touch; in fact, that's the point of remembering.
So is "Halcyon Digest" secretly a positive album? Well, no; even at the end, with "He Would Have Laughed", the band's tribute to Jay Reatard, Bradford grunts, "Oh, shut the hell up, / shut your mouth", as if he's exhausted of remembering, of altering his memories, of his own sentimentalities; what follows afterwards is a twinkling of light as reflected in the music, a near-end to the fog that has seeped over the album, the music lifts and lifts ... and then it's cut short, before its seeming ending.
I still don't know what "Halcyon Digest" is, but I always find myself wanting to return to the house it builds. I never have to prepare myself, because this house isn't haunted, there's no uncomfortable feeling inside of it; there's certainly warmth in it, there's a kindredship throughout it.
If anything comes close at all to toppling "Halcyon Digest" though, it's Chuck Person's, really Oneohtrix Point Never's, really Daniel Lopatin's "Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1". Everything is revealed in that extremely chopped-up, looped, hazy version of "Africa" that kicks off the tape. It's very hard to describe "Eccojams"; haunted may be the best word. It resembles "Halcyon Digest" a great deal in that it's not tonally happy or sad, it achieves some kind of artistic effect by bludgeoning its samples.
I'm not going to forget this time - I think Flying Lotus's "Cosmogramma" is his best. He's funnier in "You're Dead!" (2014), more meditative in "Until the Quiet Comes" (2012), but there's an odd urgency to "Cosmogramma", as can be heard from opening track "Clock Catcher". Violence lurks under "Computer Face / Pure Being"; there's an abrasiveness to "Arkestry"; a restiveness to "Mmmhmm"; and a rage in "Do the Astral Plane". In our modern era, listeners may think I imply something political; incorrect; in discussing the album, FlyLo spoke about his aunt, Alice Coltrane, whose death was close to his mother's. The Coltrane's, Alice and John, understood very well how the tension of existence can be expressed through music. I think this is the closest FlyLo came to that universal drama; "Cosmogramma" is neither funny nor serious, everything it has to say is in the rhythm itself.
This was a very good year. Another winner in any other year would be LCD Soundsystem's "This Is Happening". I don't quite understand why, but I listened to it a lot in my senior year of high school. It was a "Whatever" phase; though James Murphy exhorts you to "Dance Yrself Clean", it really doesn't matter if you do or not. "Tell me a lie, / make it easy for me, / dance with me until I feel all right," James sings in "I Can Change", but one doesn't believe that he believes in what he's saying. If there's any sincerity, it's in the act of dancing itself.
Let us mention in brief Gil-Scott Heron's last album, "I'm New Here", an album so good they remixed it twice. He's in full poetic form here; see "Where Did The Night Go", "Running".
2011
I keep returning to the same lyrics in Destroyer's "Kaputt", particularly in "Blue Eyes":
You terrify the land, you are pestle and mortar, your first love's New Order, Mother Nature's son, King of the Everglades, population one, I write poetry for myself, I write poetry for myself...
When I heard these lyrics when I was, maybe 19, maybe 20, they shook me; what was shocking wasn't what the lyrics were depicting, but Dan Bejar's relentlessness, his stream-of-consciousness, his inability to say what he actually wants to say and yet somehow finding even more beautiful things to say in the process of discovery. "You are pestle and mortar" is not a great compliment, and yet as he goes on, "Your first love's New Order, / Mother Nature's son", it sounds like he enters a Yeatsian revelry.
Then, the follow-up:
You're a permanent figure of jacked-up sorrow, I want you to love me you send me a coffin of roses I guess that's the way that things go these days,
filling the air with his romantic drivel, which has the effect of filling the monochrome sky of Queen Elizabeth Park, which the cover art captures, with the adventures of this sad-sack, this know-it-all, this crooner, this loser, this mush-mouth, marble-mouth ... it's a song about a life, and though that life was small, what a life it was. It becomes even more tense when Dan sings, "Take pills for instance, I've heard they're no good for you, / I won't, and I never will," as you then come to understand: this life is also ending. The singer isn't dying, but they're soon entering a hell like hospice, a retirement for romantics.
Dan Bejar is a mystery, man. I don't know what went behind "Kaputt". There is so much melancholy layered behind that intro to the title track. Chalk it up to Roxy Music for influencing the band, I guess; it's not so much the band wasn't composed of excellent musicians before, but there's something about the synth and the trumpet that compelled the band to linger, to look a little longer at a scene, to shut Dan up and let the music talk before he did. Dan, as bardic as Dylan, can talk someone's ear off, and yet the moments when he isn't explaining himself are the most important in "Kaputt". Which all culminates into the epic "Bay of Pigs (Detail)", beginning with that expansive Wilco-esque drone before Dan enters in and sculpts the scene; he's drunk, he's lucid, he's a poet, and he's going to stumble through the night and warn you incessantly that "the wind through the trees make you mental, for me."
(As an aside: I recall during this period of time musicians really liked long, drone-y tracks a la Wilco's "Reservations". I was thinking of "Bay of Pigs (Detail)" and Deerhunter's "He Would Have Laughed" and probably a billion other songs I can't remember. Bring back arty farty shit! Bring back navel-gazing!)
It's shocking that I haven't written about "Kaputt" yet. I sorta did, but in truth I'm scared to shit to write about it. I love this album so much. It is a novel or a film put to music. I'm sure critics say that a lot, but you can seriously go through each track and see every episode our character goes through before he passes out in Queen Elizabeth Park. It's sheer magic.
2012
There's always some lyric in Fiona Apple's "Idler Wheel ..." I'm captivated by. This year it's been the opening verses of "Anything We Want":
My cheeks were
reflecting the longest wavelength,
my fan was folded up
and grazing my forehead,
and I kept
touching my neck
to guide your eye to where I wanted you to
kiss me, when we find some time alone.
But on other days, it's the verses of "Hot Butter":
I'm a hot knife, I'm a hot knife, I'm a hot knife, he's a pad of butter, if I get the chance I'm going to show him that he's never gonna need another, ever need another,
Then Fiona, roaring,
He EXCITES me, must be like the genesis of rhythm, I get FEISTy whenever I'm with him.
On other days, it's "Jonathan"
Just tolerate my litte fist tugging on your forest chest, I don't want to talk about... I don't want to talk about anything.
And then there's "Periphery":
Go to the periphery, have them celebrate your name, have them forge you a pedigree, and then you'll be left to run the races lame.
This is my songbook. These are the lyrics I return to time and time again. "This is what you're getting at when you write," I tell myself. Art has to be about the artist, and art is about the artist exploring themself; in short, part of art is the artist going mad, and in their madness transforming the world around them, in the same way you can see all of van Gogh's troubles in his deformed, fiery paintings.
It's always fun discussing Fiona's songwriting. Note the progression in "Anything We Want", where she hangs on verbs before revealing the object of her sentences, "were" leading to "longest wavelength", "folded up" "grazing my forehead". These are subtle ways she transforms mundane things into the fantastical. Then, coy, Fiona keeps "touching my neck" ... "to guide your eyes to where I wanted you to kiss me", giving out each "to" gradually and patiently like setting breadcrumbs for her lover to look at her; each "to" rumbles like a train car. We must note a transformation happens here, taking the humble and meek "neck" into the alert and darting "eyes".
Repetition is key to her artform. She's no different than Gertrude Stein that way. The "I'm a hot knife, I'm a hot knife" hypnotizes you, convincing you she is, indeed, a hot knife, and then Fiona violently takes the lens of the viewer into "he's a pad of butter", as if the spell she put upon herself extends to the object of her affection. Once her object is transmogrified, her heart becomes fluttery, hungry, animalistic; she babbles, "if I get the chance I'm going to show him that he's never gonna need another, never need another", the n's of the words bouncing off her tongue. "Gonna" transforms to "never", "never" an inflexible, harsh, and powerful word. And then, Fiona shouts "the gen-e-sis of rhy-thm!", almost giving her magic away; the very phrase, moving from e's and s's to the sturdy, pounding rh's and th's of "rhythm" shows just precisely how the energy of "genesis" converts into the matter of "rhythm", of dancing feet, of pointed toes, of thrown chins.
In another examination, repetition in "Jonathan" and "Periphery" is a way to express Fiona doubting, of Fiona thinking, of Fiona not sure just what it is she doesn't want to talk, of Fiona not sure just exactly why it is she hates the people in the periphery.
Words cannot express how these words excite me. Words cannot express how gigantic I think these words are. When you are looking at art, the only words adequate to describe the art are the words of the art themselves. So let's say no more; this is my rock, a mighty one, greater than the Himalayas.
2013
Now this is where things get wacky. It used to be Kanye's "Yeezus". It's now The Field's "Cupid's Head". Which might piss people off, because I'm fairly certain only five people know this album.
It's interesting how my year lists have very little electronic albums on them, even though I love electronic music. ...How do I put it? It's the same love as one's love for Dan Flashes shirts. I love the tempo, the complexity and the texture of electronic music. When I wrote up the 2000s list, "Vocalcity" (2000) was the greatest opponent for "Supreme Clientele"; "Vocalcity", to me, is like admiring the pattern on silk, watching as the clicks n' cuts dance across the silence of the track. There's something about the album both warm and cold at the same time, denoted simultaneously by the echo and fuzz of those clicks n' cuts.
I think electronic music never makes the cut because it's so modest. "Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records" (2001) murmurs; "Morals and Dogma" (2004) is always lurking, never entering the foreground; and "Discovery" (2001) is so laser-focused on the party. There's an interesting utilitarianism to electronic music; everyone knows what it's for, so why be excessive?
"Cupid's Head" finally breaks through this list because I realized just how much I vibe with Axel Willner's aesthetic, or the set of ideas that go behind his music. "From Here We Go Sublime" (2007) is his most well-known album, and yet he got better from there. "From Here We Go" is very flashy and pop-driven; "From Here We Go" onwards he doubled-down on the hypnotic nature of the beat, as can be heard in "Yesterday and Today" (2009) and "Looping State of Mind" (2011). Willner places more and more emphasis on the beat, such that it becomes closer and closer to the beating of the heart, and then, beneath the beat, he adds layers and layers of sound. He then varies the beat, switches up its timing, adding more variations to the underlaying tracks, until you realize you are nowhere near where you started with the song, it has altered into a completely different pattern by the end. Even in, say, "20 Seconds of Affection" in "Cupid's Head", by far Willner's most repetitive song, there's something to the echoes of the drum machine and the timing of his pulses that ensures you don't get bored.
And that's where "Cupid's Head" lies - "Yesterday and Today" and "Looping State of Mind" are warm, romantic records, and "Cupid's Head" onwards - "The Follower" (2016), "Infinite Moment" (2018), before his comeback with "Now We Exist" (2026) - are darker, closer to the science-fiction origins of techno. "Cupid's Head" is very romantic - listen to the warmth and crackling electricity behind the title track and "A Guided Tour" - and yet Willner is now beyond thinking romance is strictly a good thing. It's telling he sandwiches these tracks with the repressive "Black Sea" and "No. No...". This overall gives "Cupid's Head" a very sensual feel - what thrives through the record isn't necessarily love, but sensuality, a particular love for a texture that borders on cruelty.
I listened to "Cupid's Head" the same year "Yeezus" came out and, of course, I as a younger man thrilled more to the brutality of "Black Skinhead" and "New Slaves". But "Cupid's Head" has really won me over as the years have passed by. I know this is "Fuck Kanye" season, but never have I thought, "I want to get closer to the artistry of Yeezus." I do want to explore more of the textures and design patterns of The Field.
But really, "Yeezus" is Ye's best songwriting album yet. Is it offensive, is it meant to shock you? Sure - but does the shock develop a character, tell you of the hollowness of the person who attempts to shock you? Absolutely. "808s" is his most artistic, his most aesthetically-driven, but "Yeezus" is his most mature - and it has been a long time since he displayed the singleness of vision of "Yeezus".
This year turned out to be better than I remember. So you know, this is the same year Beyoncé's self-titled came out, which I do think is probably the most influential pop album of the 2010s; of all time, hmm, a question for later. "Pretty Hurts" is magic. "Drunk in Love" hits you. And then, when you think Bey is too immersed in her dark shit, she'll do an "XO", proving she's in total control of her craft, no drama required. Amazing artist. I, unfortunately, just admire the other two albums more.
2014
The heart of art is expression. It's about what you want to say and how you want to say it. If you affirm a work's existence, you are affirming what the work is expressing or how it does; if you deny a work's existence, you are denying what the work is expressing and how it expresses it. A critic's affirmation says as much as their denial. In so saying, most critics are merchants of pleasure; they dislike austerity, unless there's something lubricious in it, in Sadeian fashion. That's fine; to each their own.
I like to believe that I am obsessed with expression. I am very interested in the "how" of expression. I know people characterize Grouper's "Ruins" as experimental; I do not. I know people compare "Ruins" to Erik Satie's "Gymnopédies"; I do not. I do not know what to call it. It is, simply, expression.
The dull drum, as dull as a heartbeat, beginning "Made of Metal" and growing in frequency and loudness and intensity, is expression. The microwave beep ending "Labyrinth" is expression. And Grouper murmuring, "Calling on shadows / and calling on shadows", in "Lighthouse", is expression.
But what, precisely, is Liz expressing? Listen to "Lighthouse" and hear how the chords awkwardly tumble and stumble over one another, falling out of time; then, in "Labyrinth", the chords are painfully in time as Liz plays the same ones over and over again. The repetition achieves a hypnotic effect, but we don't get the impression Liz is trying to put us under a spell, especially when she sings, as in "Clearing":
I'm treading in the water, human in the shadows, no longer your shadow, clearing, I know where your light is
The lyrics stink of desperation and sadness and finally resignation. No, I don't these songs are spells; I think they express the hypnotized state of the singer herself.
What else does the repetition convey? As Grouper herself said, the album was recorded on a portable 4-track, Sony stereo mic; the music crackles with ambient noises, the piano echoes and suffuses across the murk of the recording, and every sound feels dull and behind a fog. We are not hypnotized, as we may be in the music of The Field; we are, as the names of the tracks convey, lost, in a trance, in the process of discovering what is real and what in remains; "Ruins".
I've already spoken on "Holding", which is one of my favorite songs of all time and which write-up convinced me this was the best album of 2014. In comparison to the other tracks, "Holding" is emotional to the point of haunting you and leaving scars in your soul, but on so many listens of "Ruins" all of the tracks are emotional, they're just buried by years of earth and sea. This is expression at its finest.
The winner used to be Swans' "To Be Kind", but "To Be Kind" is just too long for me. Even then, it has the same effect as "Ruins": it is hypnotic. In contrast to "Ruins", it is forceful, it is violent, it is disfiguring; it is the best of Swans' work because it's so clean and so clear in its intentions. What the album is is depicted on its cover: the head of a crying baby. It's about lost innocence, it's about destruction, it's about rage, and it's, finally, about loss. Incredible record, but, though both "To Be Kind" and "Ruins" are about violence, "Ruins" is, ironically, the one about rebuilding after experiencing trauma. It is the more mature album.
D'Angelo's "Black Messiah" is also at the tippy-top of this list, but it's a little too unfocused for me. D'Angelo was still the king of making the hard look easy; take "Ain't That Easy' and "Really Love". It's a shame. I think everyone knew he had more things to show.
2015
I have no idea what happened but this is one of the worst years of music.
For me. This was one of the greatest years for rap, objectively. "To Pimp a Butterfly", duh. Future's "DS2". Vince Staples' "Summertime '06".
I just think those albums are fucking messes.
OK, so what's left ... Father John Misty? Eh. I like Jamie xx's "In Colour", but it's a bit bland. "Carrie & Lowell"? Ehhhhhh. Sleater-Kinney? Ehhhhhhhhhhh.
I do not vibe with this year at all. It's strange how every other year of music, there's something worthy of at least putting in the spotlight. 2015, nothing.
Except for DJ Richard's "Grind", which I am 100% sure you have not heard of.
The reason why "Grind" is here is because I listen to it a lot. I did not realize how much I philosophically related to it until I seriously considered offering up as a contender.
I think the true key for "Grind" actually comes from its follow-up "Dies Irae Xerox" (2018), which is a very interesting album. "Grind" is a dance record; "Dies Irae Xerox" is not. It's a film soundtrack, maybe, it's a sequence of textures, it's experimental, it's industrial music, who knows. It may go on for too long - 55 minutes, hoo boy - but it showcases the particular brutality and grimness of Richard's own mental world. This is very clear in starting tracks "Pitfall" and "Vanguard", with "Pitfall" churning and grinding and "Vanguard" closer to the baroque EDM-ism that put a spotlight on Richard. But I think the truly good tracks are "In Broad Daylight" and "Final Mercy" which are more brooding; "Final Mercy" in particular is near-funereal.
"Dies Irae Xerox" doesn't strike me as a coherent album; it's overindulgent, honestly. And yet it attempts to find a language within music itself powerful enough to paint Richard's fantasy world. Another cipher into his way of thinking seems to be the "Eraser" EP (2019), which ends with "Casca's Theme", an uber-violent track with a pummeling drum machine and some thing that sounds like the wailing of spirits that come in around the one-minute mark. I obviously can't say who Casca alludes to; as a weeb I'd say Casca of "Berserk", but maybe it refers to the historical fantasy novels. In any case, this all seems to imply a fantastical violence; Richard is trying to depict the gasps of a dying world, of an existence of endless suffering, of innumerable evils, of death without dignity.
And so we finally turn to "Grind", an album grounded more in reality, the cover art possibly of a locale in his Rhode Island. The cover art depicts exactly what the music connotes: of abandonment, of loneliness, of despair, and yet of a need to enhance even that despair and make it fantastical.
I'll actually start with the end of the album, one of my favorite songs of all time, "Vampire Dub". I wish I knew how he made the music; I see very little credits for his work. The opening of "Vampire Dub" to me is like a shimmering of stars in the night; compared to the preceding music it's quiescent, it's relaxing, and yet as you listen to it it feels empty, it feels too bubbly, there's something hollow in the sound envelope. As the music proceeds, with these bright notes interchanging among themselves and scattering echoes throughout the track, the hi-hats and the drum machine come in, giving the music something meaty and physical. And then, around the 3:13 mark, the music gives way and a long drone enters in. These five elements - I failed to mention a bubbly synth - wind through one another, leaving sometimes, re-entering again, before fading into silence by track's end.
You never quite shake the fact that the track is artificial, and yet the emotions it is trying to convey, its melancholy, and its gloominess, are real. This is the figurative vampire, a spector that cannot die even as every human institution crumbles around it. And, to be clear, it's not a sinister song whatsoever, but it's also not a sentimental song; I would call it a seething song.
We then turn to the second track "Nighthawk", beginning with a bubbling fount of pulses and hums before the drum machine kicks in, again grounding the music in something physical. The drum machine overcomes the pulses and hums, becoming more and more complex and entering patterns closer to footwork, before something sounding like an air siren screeches into the track, at first softly and remotely until the drum machine is overtaken by it.
"Nighthawk" never becomes catchy, but the track is ruled by this tension, of the soft pulses, of the clattering drum machine, and that searing siren, neither element really giving way to one another but fighting for the foreground. It's gripping. It's interesting. One can say it's dramatic.
The more danceable tracks begin with "Savage Coast", which has your usual house bounce and the drum machine skittering across the track, but it's so ... again, with those pulses, the music is so melancholy, as if the pulses are swirling through a fog like a lighthouse. Later the music wells up, but it doesn't make you excited, it's ominous.
"Bane", in contrast, is hyperviolent, it's fast, it's a confusion of different instruments, but you see that same tension in "Nighthawk", where each individual track fights for primacy - and after the rage of "Bane" we get another track that doesn't resolve, that has no one element demanding focus, in the smokey "I-Mir".
It's hard to put a finger on Richard's aesthetic. I think part of the reason is that "Grind" is young - it has the feel of an artist figuring out just what it is he likes. But it's clear, after listening to "Dies Irae Xerox", he is an artist who very much likes the texture of music, and he's also a musician who is excellent at time; when there are so many clashing elements in a composition, it is a bit of a feat to make them agree with one another. I think the only thing that may be premature in Richard is the concept of "loudness", of having one element in the music being louder than the other so as to direct the listener's attention to it. You notice this in "Xerox", and in "Grind" this is less noticeable because the music adheres more to traditional techno structure, which is the rhythm of the dancefloor.
There are two paths for electronic artists: you go DJ Koze or Four Tet and forsake everything for danceability, or you go Deathprod or Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and use the music to "sculpt" an impression, an idea, a mood. I think Richard throughout his releases is flirting with both, and while nothing in art is set in stone I do think he would advantage from the subtlety of Deathprod's approach. (I like DJ Koze, but I'm more team Deathprod / Basinski. I guess there's also the Drexciya route, but I do think for album cohesion you want a softer touch than techno's rough touch. It's kinda like how Jlin never forsook the extreme violence of footwork, but she's delved very deeply into the weight of sound and timing, as I think was masterfully done in "Perspective" (2023).
Jlin and Richard actually make for an interesting comparison; I love Jlin's timekeeping, Richard's emotional range is more appealing to me.)
I cannot blame Richard for vanishing from the public eye; Discogs says his last work was "Eraser", so he has disappeared since 2019. This was also the case of Axel Willner mentioned above, but Willner enjoyed critical acclaim for all of his releases; I think for Richard it's "Grind" and that's it.
I dunno. It would be nice to see another release from him. But it's up to him; whatever.
I used to be Dave Douglas's "High Risk" in this spot, and I once compared its electronic textures to Eno's "Another Green World"; I love the jog of "Household Item" and the blurriness of "Cardinals", but I also crave color and tone.
I would choose H. Jon Benjamin's "Well I Should Have... (Learned How To Play Piano)" but the spoken-word is so bad and not really funny. But "I Can't Play Piano, Pt. 1" is so, sooo funny.
2016
The placement of "Lemonade" on this list is based on these songs solely:
Every other song is fine, but I don't necessarily empathize with them or find them technically admirable. I really like "Freedom" and "Formation", but I'm very okay with "6 Inch" and "Daddy Lessons".
I've already spoken on "Hold Up" in the past; I'm debating to myself whether I should get into "Love Drought" and "Sandcastles". I'm actually not sure how I feel about "Lemonade".
I keep circling around this subject. It's never a guarantee that I feel comfortable with a truly great album, but "Lemonade" is the one I question the most. I think I will save "Love Drought" and "Sandcastles" for possible individual write-ups someday and table a discussion on "Lemonade" for now, because I am finding my grasp on this album is very finicky. I do think it's a great album, though.
This is a very weird year, and the weirdness of the year is the reason why "Lemonade" is so tenuously crowned. This was a great year for music because every genre showed up: rock ("WORRY.", "MY WOMAN", "You Want It Darker"), rap ("We got it from Here...", "Run the Jewels 3", "Atrocity Exhbition", "Coloring Book", "untitled unmastered"), hip-hop ("Malibu", "Freetown Sound"), electronic ("Wildflower", "Varmints"), pop ("I Had A Dream That You Were Mine"), metal ("Starspawn") and weird experimental shit ("Blackstar", "Blonde", "Hopelessness"). Hey, let's throw in Dick Gregory's "You Don't Know Dick". And yet I just ... don't ... care. I think if you listen to music only for catchiness, great year, but it's music as a form of expression I thrill to.
Alright. So let's get this square.
Bowie's "Blackstar" was my 2016 pick for a short period of time, but, like "Lemonade", I really only listen to a few tracks.
"Coloring Book" I argued is too shallow for me, but it's still one of the most interesting rap projects ... ever.
"WORRY." is consistently high in my rankings; it was good when it came out and it gets so much better with age. I, unfortunately, have not heard all of it yet because it gets same-y after a while. But "Staring Out the Window at Your Old Apartment"? "Wave Goodnight to Me"? Brilliant. And I always think of "Perfect Sound Whatever" whenever I just want to give up and yell, "It's good enough, it's done!" This album definitely deserves a highlight someday. Who knows? Maybe it'll take the 2016 spot in the future.
...I am getting closer to the opinion Frank Ocean's "Blonde" should take it. I thought breaking the album into a million disconnected songs was super annoying, but given that I'm giving 2013 to "Cupid's Head" and 2015 to "Grind", I'm definitely in a mood to appreciate the piecemeal and confused nature of "Blonde". A good sign is that I'm sitting here getting annoyed listening to "Blonde" while wondering "What's the point of this?" and answering myself, "Why should there be a point?" When you don't care you tend to just look at the music on its own, which means you are more receptive to the artist's own idiosyncrasies and about to look over what you think the music "should" be. The use of silence in "Blonde" is very, very interesting.
I could just give it to PUP's "The Dream Is Over", but ... as much as I enjoyed Babcock's bitching, there's a little too much in that album.
Weird year. I'm disappointed only at the very time of write-up I'm just not digging it.
2017
I am amazed by how much Jay-Z's or JAY-Z's or JAŸ-Z's "4:44" still holds up and how much I do not care at all for his other work.
Every time I hear "Reasonable Doubt" (1996) I think, "Rae did it better." Every time I hear "Blueprint" (2001) I think, "Kanye did it better." And every time I hear "4:44" I think, "No one did this better. Ever."
No one has really come close to "4:44", and if you look at Jay-Z's artistic profile one glimmers why. Jay strikes me as someone who was either always at the right place at the right time or as someone who had a keen sense for when to be where. I know it's not fair to frame everything around the Wu-Tang Clan but ... come on, "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx" came out on August 1995 and "Liquid Swords" on November 1995, with "Ironman" following "Reasonable Doubt" a few months later. "The Infamous" is also a 1995 baby.
You can listen to all of these and figure out how Jay came upon his formula: he struck, literally, in the middle. The Wu were grimy, gritty, Mobb Deep were violent, but Jay was more interested with money-making, which probably ingratiated him to a wider audience. There's a ruggedness to the samples of "Dead Presidents" and a deadened feeling to the sound of "Feelin' It" but Jay's rapping, interestingly, feels expensive. Maybe it's because he's so universal you can't think of anything else, but a lot of it is the clarity and cleanliness of his voice, the lucidity of his perspective and what he is rapping about, and his, relatively, meditative flow. In contrast, Rae in "Knuckleheadz" is out to kill, spitting out as many images as possible that enters his retina and every scent that enters his nostrils, weaving a cinematic scene, and this is before rap became obsessed with so-fast-you-can't-breathe flows. The Wu is like whiskey, they favored intensity; Jay is like vodka, not really known for flavor but for smoothness.
This same dynamic plays again in "Blueprint". What is the album full of? Ehhhhh... I'm the boss, girls like me, don't step to me, I'm a renegade? Then look at "Graduation" (2007): Kanye raps about his struggles, arriving into the good life, how you can't tell him nothing, and finally reflecting on everything he is (at that time). It's an album that favors intensity, it's an album wherein Kanye is a cartoon character, it's overall a very goofy album, but ... that's what make it interesting.
And yet, as indifferent as I am to the material in "Blueprint", I still remember verses from them, as the one kicking off "Izzo (H.O.V.A)":
Fo shizzle my nizzle, used to dribble down in VA, was herbin' 'em in the home of the Terrapins, got it dirt cheap for them, plus if they was short for cheese, I would work with them, brought in weed, got rid of that dirt for them, wasn't born hustlers, I was birthing them.
What you notice about the language is that Jay doesn't focus on any particular image or sensation, but at the heart of his artistic style is relationships, how Jay interacts with other human beings. As in this verse, we're captivated as to how Jay describes his hustling in Virginia, how his emotions change from line to line, and how he changes his view of himself as well.
But ... what strikes me is that Jay's humanity largely revolves around gaming other drug dealers and women, eventually record labels and other millionaires. And I just ... I just don't care, as incredible as his rapping is.
Until "4:44".
Okay, let's do this quick: the story of "4:44" is, everyone knew Jay-Z was cheating on his wife, Beyoncé, for a long time. I don't remember when this started, all I remember is that there was a big headline where Bey's sister, Solange, brought this up to Jay-Z in an elevator; and Solange doesn't really take shit from anyone so you can see where this goes.
Then Beyoncé releases "Lemonade", whose first half basically tells her husband to fuck off to outer space, and then in the dizzyingly astounding second half forgives her husband in the incredible "Sandcastles" (mentioned above) and then discusses black women and their relationship to their blackness and their womenness. There are so many ways of looking at this situation; one, the situation had been simmering for so long I think most people thought, "It makes (some) sense for Beyoncé to put this in the court of public opinion"; two, Jay-Z is either an asshole or oblivious or both, so, whatever; three, "Lemonade" is the hardest flex I've ever seen anyone give to their significant other. Jay-Z is not the Jay-Z he was before; "Lemonade" did quite a bit to bring Jay-Z's stature down a few pegs. Like, listen to "Lemonade"; it's the aural version of Beyoncé smiling and saying, "Oh you think you're talented, how cute." It's one thing to be humiliated and 1. everyone knows you're wrong and 2. everyone thinks you're an asshole but it's another thing for the plaintiff to basically prove, like mathematically demonstrate, like literally prove in Stephen Hawking mode, that you are not worth shit and I only have to move my pinky to do what you struggle with. As Beyoncé sings or threatens in "Formation", "you can be the black Bill Gates in the making." That's some mafia shit. It's a scary album.
(The Bill Gates - Jay-Z relation is a little creepy with what we know of The Files, but let's set that aside.)
And so yeah, "4:44".
"4:44" had the effect of taking all of Jay's best traits in his previous albums and tampering down entirely his worst traits. Again, he had the ass-whupping of a lifetime, like, Mike Tyson pummeling his opponent down in Round 1, or Buster Douglas pounding on Mike Tyson with his left, like that level of beatdown. To Jay's credit, he does sound legitimately humbled, which allows his conversational skills to really flourish. Jay-Z has never been one to introspect; when he finally looked deep into himself, he found treasures.
What's incredible too is that he completely dismantles himself, not in an emotional way, but in a moral, logical way. Take opener "Kill Jay-Z":
You egged Solange on,
knowing all along
all you had to say you was wrong
You almost went Eric Benét,
let the baddest girl in the world get away,
I don't even know what to say,
nigga, never go Eric Benét!
Be astounded for a moment how it moves from genuine remorse to humor in the next moment, flawlessly, before he glances at the tragedy of his ongoing situation:
I don't even know what you woulda done in the future other niggas playing football with your son
on impeccable, IMPECCABLE, flow too. I don't know what goes on in Jay-Z's head, obviously, but he somehow figured out a form of expression that equaled his wife's, which I honestly thought was an impossible feat.
"4:44" impresses me so much because music is an emotional medium, but "4:44" is a very logical album. It's so strange to hear Jay use rap, which is an inherently conversational medium, to break down himself, society, and wealth. You could literally go through the title track and find gold in every bar. When I wrote about "4:44" last, I highlighted "We supposed to vacay 'til our back burn"; let's focus on a different verse:
I harassed you out in Paris, "Please come back to Rome, you make it home", we talked for hours when you were on tour, "Please pick up the phone, pick up the phone", I said "Don't embarrass me" instead of "Be mine", that was my proposal for us to go steady, that was your twenty-first birthday, you matured faster than me, I wasn't ready.
In writing one always fears losing the reader, and yet Jay puts the action of the verses so clearly, interweaving his narration with actual emotional pleas for forgiveness; then, continuing the concept, Jay bridges the then with the now through that "Don't embarrass me" and "Be mine", more echoes of the past. That is the title track at its heart: it's Jay masterfully weaving past, present and future. I would even call it the pinnacle in the form of poetry Gil-Scott Heron honed.
But "4:44" is not just Jay-Z settling matters with his wife, in the court of public opinion, which is weird. He is having a discussion about humanity, about what marriage means, about what legacy means, about what wealth means. There's the famous verse in "Caught Their Eyes":
I sat down with Prince, eye-to-eye, he told me his wishes before he died, now, Londell McMillan, he must be color-blind, they only see green from them purple eyes, ... This guy had "Slave" on his face, you think he wanted the masters with his masters? You greedy bastards sold tickets to walk through his house, I'm surprised you ain't auction off the casket.
I already wrote about this album, and now I just want to write more about it.
When I last wrote about it, I said "4:44" was akin to Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks". I don't retract that claim at all. For someone I had thought little about, and to this day don't understand, "4:44" is a great American artwork. It's not dated whatsoever, and it's worthy of study decades from now.
"DAMN." got fucking robbed.
I think "DAMN." is the best Kendrick album by miles; it is varied, it is focused, it is very incisive. Kendrick adopts some of Jay's conversational tone in "XXX", where he paints the logical argument for gang violence. Kendrick makes rapping look so easy on "ELEMENT". Then there's the blockbuster "FEAR" and the fake-conciliatory "GOD", which does nothing to dispel true fear. It is 100% worth a write-up and a winner any other year, except this one, and except 2011, and 2012, and whatever, BUT EVERY OTHER YEAR it would win.
Shout out to Vince Staples' "Big Fish Theory" in this brutal year; "Big Fish Theory" is the album where Vince is both comfortable and uncomfortable, his smooth rapping delivery contrasted with the aggressive synths of the music. This and "FM!" (2018) brought a face to Staples no one would associate with him, his "I'm trying my darnedest to have fun" persona; I think he needs to be uncomfortable again.
Oh, and another shout-out to Waxahatchee's "Out in the Storm", where she memorably sings "I'll play the old shag carpet, / you can walk all over me" in "Silver". A beautifully written album which I wrote about in this blog in a not-good way.
2018
I think I was blinded by Father John Misty's hipster horseshit in 2016's "I Love You, Honeybear".
Let's step back: I quite like "I Love You, Honeybear". It's actually another highlight of 2016 I forgot because there were so many good picks in 2016 (and somehow I still couldn't come up with something for the top slot). The title track is great and I used to play "Chateau Lobby #4" all the time in college (the song describes virgins, and I was a virgin). "Holy Shit" is also great.
It's still hipster horseshit.
It's in the lyrics, it's in the arrangements (a lush orchestral arrangement a la the Beatles), and it's in the conceit of the whole album, of Misty trying to transform the mundanity of his life into something romantic and dramatic. "Honeybear" is a self-centered album, with Tillman ranting a lot. But its brilliance is all musicial: even if the lyrics don't convince you of Misty's ever-so-deep life, the music does, and really, the music is obviously the most important part of music. And, to Misty's credit, he's never so overbearing to take you out of the music; you can ignore his lyrics to a certain extent and understand just what it is he is freaking out about. Misty was once the drummer for Fleet Foxes, another act whose depth lies in the music and the music alone; he gets that the lyrics are the human anchor for the listener, but the music is what makes your heart swoon and what makes the listener believe.
But yeah, hipster horseshit. I did not listen to "Pure Comedy" (2017) and was somewhat annoyed by its conceit, which struck me as Misty's grand thesis on humanity. Skimming through it now, I don't think I missed anything.
And so, the subject of this year and the bruised and battered winner: "God's Favorite Customer". What a strange and long tourney for 2018.
Again, I dismissed "Customer" as hipster horseshit because of "Honeybear" and "Pure Comedy". The reviews of the album were pretty uniform: Father John Misty was going through a thing and put it on record. Okay. My heart was closed to "God's Favorite Customer".
Which is insane, because I have listened to the back half of "Customer" so. Many. Times. From "The Palace" to "The Songwriter", I have soaked in Misty's melancholy since the album came out, a decade ago.
Yeah, I'm an imperfect person, by far. I'm stubborn and I think I'm right all the time. That's why I like writing these lists as they act as reality checks, to a certain extent. I think, because I dismissed Misty as fake, I thought the back-half of "Customer" was fake and theatrical and play-pretend, and, indeed, there is a diva-like quality to "Disappointing Diamonds Are the Rarest of Them All". I thought "Hangout at the Gallows" was John being a drama queen, and "Mr. Tillman" was him being cute.
My first truly honest listen came this year, when I was re-thinking 2018. By the time I got to "Just Dumb Enough to Try", I realized how completely wrong I was.
I know a few ten-cent words I can break out to keep up with her, but you can take what I know about love and drown it in a sink,
with Misty's voice wavering on that "drown" as if he is doing just that.
I have been thinking about this verse the whole year.
You know, you have to be a huge asshole to expect honesty out of artists because artists, you know, deal in fiction. I do understand how annoying it is to have someone lie to you, but that is, in fact, art.
So why is this verse better than John's other verses? Or rather, why do I like it more?
It's because art is just that: it's expression. Unlike his other art, his expression in "God's Favorite Customer" entered into me and reached me. It finally was given the chance to fuck me up. Because I am familiar with thinking, "All that effort was for nothing and I shouldn't even have bothered trying in the first place." I understood Misty's feeling of wanting to take everything you are and drowning it in a sink, because that's how tall you ultimately are.
This is the clearest, I think, John's lyrics have been. He is generally a very distant singer. Yes, he sings about himself, but because you are aware that he is "glamorizing" or "painting" over his life you have some distance from his material, and this is true of "Chloë and the Next 20th Century" (2022) and "Mahashmashana" (2024), as far as I know, anyway. I thought he was distant in "God's Favorite Customer", because of "Disappointing Diamonds". He is not. And you can hear it in one of my favorite songs ever, "The Palace". (God, I'm such a Father John Misty hater, it's so fucked up.)
"The Palace" is just John, a piano, and a shitty recording set-up, which makes it sound like he's in a bathtub. He plays a smattering of keys, until he seems to give up on the act of songwriting and allows silence to enter in. He sings,
It's only been three weeks and a bag of speed from Jamie the PhD
then, in a majestic sweep, Misty then describes this pathetic scene (again, transformation is key to his artform):
She comes by the front desk to leave my transcript with her edits
It's a depiction of desolation T. S. Eliot would have recognized. It's a man completely disconnected from reality. Later, Misty boasts,
Last night I wrote a poem, man, I must have been in the poem zone...
the key descend, tumbling into hell, while Misty wails,
I'm in over my head... I'm in over my head...
I think about "The Palace" literally all the time when I'm writing. Again, art is fictional, it by itself is not truthful; you are making something artificial and you know it's fake and you know your role is to pretend to the audience that you know something. There are so many moments you realize how stupid it is and how much of your time you wasted on something so stupid, all themes addressed in "The Songwriter":
What would it sound like
if you were the songwriter?
and you made
your living off of me.
Would you detail your near-constant
consternation
with the way my very presence makes your muses up and flee?
If we're talking realistically, art can be a prison. You see this thing no one else does. If you succeed, people call you a visionary. When you fail, you're a drunk. What's the point of being sincere when no one else has to be?
I have to save some words for a future write-up, but returning to the top: I realized "Hangout at the Gallows" did, in fact, have the rhythms of an existential crisis, and "Mr. Tillman" is funny, but it's also real, in that no one John meets in his hotel is able to give him any empathy and he is unable to care about them. It's difficult to believe the lyrics of "Just Dumb Enough to Try" are untrue, in that no one had thought of them before; they're so pathetic in an ultra-specific way.
But, okay, let's discuss the line between reality and fiction. Did something actually happen? Misty, or Tillman, has revealed nothing about his own personal life. His fans have speculated this or that has happened, but no one actually knows.
At the end of the day, none of this speculation matters. It is the artist's task to present a complete portrait to the listener, and "God's Favorite Customer" is that complete portrait. Nothing could happen, and yet everything happens from the 0 minute mark of the album. You are with the character in his descent into heartbreak and shame and self-loathing and horror, and this descent is fully realized and told in a way that someone who is alien to the experience would understand. It's an incredible album, one I'm actually quite ashamed not to have recognized before.
The consistent winner of 2018 until this year was Makaya McCraven's "Universal Beings", which sparked my love for jazz. Jazz nowadays is very, very boring; it is safe, it is predictable, it is catchy, it is "crunchy", it is meant to meet the audience's expectations, and it is boring and not challenging. For a while I used to go through jazz catalogs every year to see if anything would catch my fancy, and I would be consistently disappointed. "Universal Beings" is not disappointing. Listen to the crack of McCraven's drums and Younger's sparkling harp in "Holy Lands". Listen to Shabaka Hutchings puff on sax in "Atlantic Black" as if he were fucking Coltrane, while keeping up with Reid's cello and McCraven's drums. Listen to Anna Butterss layer sound upon sound on her double cello in "Butterss's". I don't understand when jazz lost its physicality, its abrasiveness, its aggressiveness - or rather, I don't understand when musicians forgot that physicality isn't a thing you pretend to, it has actual meaning in the music. Alas, "Universal Beings" is long and I don't find myself listening to it from top to bottom, only listening, over and over, to my favorite tracks.
This was a good year for music. Another top contender for album of the year was Robyn's "Honey", which is her best album in my eyes. People seem to like the buffet-style of "Body Talk" (2010), but I much prefer her focus here. It would have been easy for Robyn to put out dance tracks and be done with it, but Robyn is too smart and understands the language of electronic music too well. "Because It's in the Music" has a Disney-esque melancholy running through it, and "Baby Forgive Me" is downtempo and dark. There's, of course, the jubilant, danceable title track, but Robyn chooses to end it on the downbeat funky "Ever Again" where she says you can "go ahead and try a little crazy on me". Robyn is a little scary because you can see her pulling from all kinds of lyrical influences: the great operatic singers of yore, the great crooners of yesteryear, the great pop singers of today. This is an extremely well-balanced album. She kinda got robbed, honestly.
I like Mitski's "Be the Cowboy", but I think it gets very same-y after a while. However, it's hard not to be overawed by "Geyser" and "Why Didn't You Stop Me?" I listen to "Pink in the Night" a lot too.
2019
Let's get this out of the way: David Berman, the only member of Purple Mountains, killed himself shortly after the album's release. So this just makes listening to the album really morbid. Apparently, Berman did not care much for his own reputation for melancholic lyrics.
But beyond what the deceased wants ... alright, listen, music critics can be depressed too. It's why we listen to music. We're also cynical people. But this is not a fun topic to talk about and really doesn't get at the heart of why we actually talk about music. Music has the power to transform, to subvert; it is difficult at times to listen to "Purple Mountains" because it is precisely what it is, which is a series of paintings of a person's life.
I'm very particular about the line between reality and fiction. This is a very important concept to me. Life is shitty. That doesn't mean art is not shitty, but art is a means to stare at the shittiness from a different angle. The angle you see life in can make you even sadder or it can make you smirk. Sometimes it's just a line between tragedy and comedy.
I'm not against an artist using the material from their life directly, but I find it difficult to assign a value onto that art, because I neither want to diminish the artist's perspective and yet I don't want to reward the artist for not molding and creating from their experience something greater. I dislike the positively un-philosophical concept of, "Well I did it, so it must be true."
It's interesting because Fiona Apple is in my list, Kanye as well. Why do I not flinch for them? The answer for Kanye is easy: he's lying. His boasting of his sexual prowess is a lie, and his being ashamed of himself is a truth. The resulting art is the blurring between those lines. For Fiona Apple, you sense she is trying to get at an essential truth about herself, and never arrives at it; it's the journey that's important.
This also reveals a fundamental principle of human psychology: we are always lying. We are always telling ourselves, This is who we are, this is where we are going, this is what distinguishes me from other people. These are all lies. What remains for the listener is to see what precisely the artist is willing to lie about and why.
But "Purple Mountains" is unflinchingly honest, to the point where it's hard to believe Berman is putting up any front. In so saying, there is no ego on the record, there's nothing to show, and as a result it stinks of death. Take the lyrics for "I Loved Being My Mother's Son":
I loved being my mother's son,
I loved her so because
she was so good and kind to me,
she was, she was, she was,
she helped me walk, she watched me run,
got where I was coming from,
and when I couldn't count my friends on a single thumb
I loved her to the maximum
You could argue there is an ego on the record, that of a very depressed person reinforcing their own depression. I'm not going to dive deeper into that argument because I'm already way too sad thinking of all this.
What makes the album hard to parse is that Berman uses a diaristic first-person perspective for all the songs, so it's very easy to believe the songs are about him. It's difficult to say this was his style in his previous band, Silver Jews; the famous opening line of "Random Rules" goes, "In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection", which reads as fiction. Contrast that with opening track "That's Just the Way That I Feel": "Well I don't like talking to myself / but someone's gotta say it, hell, / I mean, things have not been going well, / this time I think I finally fucked myself." This feels pretty real, don't it?
Is it a sad-sack album about a sad-sack being a sad-sack? Is the album about Berman? Or is this characterization totally wrong and there is, indeed, a conscious aesthetic molded around it? Is it actually a triumph in character-writing? I don't know.
I realized, as I write more about it, I need another essay to exorcise my feelings about it, separating how I feel about Berman and how I feel about the music.
Anyway. Let me say this: in the process of talking about the music and listening to it, it's so clearly the best album of 2019. It's so beautifully written, it's so funny, and, as I analyze it more and more, it's brilliantly arranged.
You know Hank Williams, the same Hank Williams Leonard Cohen sings, "I said to Hank Williams, How lonely does it get? / Hank Williams hasn't answered yet, / but I hear him coughing, all night long, / one hundred floors above me in the tower of song." That is David Berman on this album. That's how good he is.
Hank Williams, besides his drawl, is famous for many reasons. Listen to "Take These Chains From My Heart":
Take these chains from my heart and set me free, you've grown cold and no longer care for me, all my faith in you is gone, but the heartaches linger on, take these chains from my heart and set me free.
Perfect progression. Williams could be blunt and pictorial at the same time - he was skilled enough to weave between the two. He begins with that imagery of a chained heart and his longing to be free, and then moves onto the environment around him, which is cold; you are distinctly in that environment, giving him the cold shoulder. And after setting up this picture, Williams enters a conversational mode, with "All my faith in you is gone / but the heartaches linger on", elaborating on his emotional state and what, precisely, his "freedom" would look like, before returning back to the image and the analogy of his imprisonment. One of the most important attributes of good writing is variation, and Williams tackles every aspect, physical, emotional, logical, of the situation.
What does Dave do? Here is one of the greatest lyrics I've heard, in "Darkness and Cold":
The light of my life is going out tonight
as the sun sinks in the west,
the light of my life is going out tonight
with someone she just met;
she kept it burning longer than I had right to expect,
the light of my life is going out tonight
without a flicker of regret.
Berman achieves two major effects here: he elaborates on a metaphor of light to the woman who is leaving him, through "light", "sun", "burning" and "flicker". Of particular note is how he sets up the relations in the verse: "as the sun sinks in the west" has the same illustration as "you've grown cold", and the r's of "flicker of regret" is as harsh as the cold winds Berman will describe.
Another favorite verse, later:
The light of my life is going out tonight
in a pink champagne Corvette
I sleep three feet above the street
in a band-aid pink Chevette
This is so perfect a scene transition that I feel I hardly even need to get into it. I will only remark: it is so sad juxtaposing Berman's ex-wife going out to live her life while he himself is moldering to his grave in his dumpy car.
Then, take the upbeat (somehow!) "All My Happiness is Gone":
Friends are warmer than gold when you're old and keeping them is harder than you might suppose, lately I tend to make strangers wherever I go, some of them were once people I was happy to know.
Let's mention the band, Woods. Jeremy Earl on drums and Jarvis Taveniere lend the song the aura of "On The Road Again"; it's an energetic travel song, perfectly accentuated by Berman's "wherever I go". A lot of the music on "Purple Mountains" contrasts the harshness of Berman's lyrics, which gives Berman that Bob Dylan feel of being an eternal traveler; indeed, when Berman notes that "friends are warmer than gold" it has all the hallmarks of wisdom and comfort in one's year, until he sings "when you're old", as if he is writing his epitaph.
It's a bitter song, whose chorus is, of course, "all my happiness is gone", but one gets the distinct impression that, despite Berman's unhappiness, he is still going on. The music connotes that even if the road is dark, Berman is still compelled to go down it.
It's later in "All My Happiness is Gone" where Berman sings:
It's not the purple hills, it's not the silver lakes, it's not the snowcloud shadowed interstates, it's not the icy bike chain rain of Portland, Oregon,
which furthers the traveling, wandering themes of "Purple Mountains", but I think this holds another key here: "Purple Mountains" is not ironically titled, Berman genuinely believes in the beauty and majesty of life. It's only that that beauty and majesty occurs to him logically; he has become withered and dried to life emotionally.
I'm getting worried that I'm going to talk forever about this album - which is a good sign of its staying power - and this may transform into an essay I absolutely want to write in the future, so let's end on "Maybe I'm the Only One For Me", maybe one of the greatest songs ever and one Berman described as incel-inflected. It's very, very funny, which is why one is led to believe it's optimistic. Berman, ever our Hank Williams, admits,
I'll put my dreams, high on a shelf, I'll have to learn to like myself
and later,
If no one's fond of fucking me, maybe no one's fucking fond of me
C'mon, everyone's thought this once or twice.
What amazes me is that you can look at the song in multiple ways. On one hand it's funny, but it's also not funny if you look at it as loathing; I mean, these are sharp barbs. I think everyone is also familiar with how their most absurd thoughts can also be the ones that hurt them the most. These lyrics are absurd, but if you happen to be in the frame of mind of their singer, then this song can be real depressing real fast. It is somehow a very blunt song with many subtle colors, like Rothko's black paintings.
I know I should save this for another essay, but let me put this in brief: Berman kind of was a fuck-up, and he knew he was; he sings in "That's Just the Way That I Feel", "You see the life I live is sickening, / I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion." He was not given a fair hand by the music industry, and yet he also did not put himself on a good footing with his chosen vocation. This question has haunted me for the last few nights: was his final decision rational?
Again, I'd prefer to explore the question in a separate piece, and the answer to that question has to be an empathic NO, but logic doesn't really go behind suicide. I'll say this: every time I listen to this album, part of me doesn't want to listen to it, because I just wish he didn't do what he did. It's so hard listening to an album with such supreme gifts knowing that the artist could never enjoy finding out what he gave to other people. And it's even worse when you know the artist was intent on hurting themself as much as possible. If Berman was numb to emotion by the time of his death, I can only hope to say with sufficient emotion: I wish he was here, even if he was a fuck-up, so that he at least could be assured of what he was, by our telling him he's one of the greatest songwriters who'd ever dunnit.
Alright, one more thing I should save but here it goes: as detailed in Wikipedia, Dave in 2017 tried to record what would become his last album with Dan Bejar of Destroyer; Bejar noted the music created then was manic, more in line with Berman's '90s output. Ultimately, this session was unfruitful and it would be the 2018 session with Woods that culminated in the record we see today. Without getting too into "The Natural Bridge" (1996) and "American Water" (1998), Dave's Silver Jews output, look at their covers: angular, geometric, colorful. The cover of "American Water" is a study in contrasts, the blue sky, the grey mountains, the pink road, with the wonky "Silver Jews" on the top left. Dave described the music (not the lyrics) recorded with Dan were "rigid" and he couldn't write lyrics for them.
Dave, for whatever reason, did not want to create more Silver Jews music; he did not want to make music that was sharp and incisive and picturesque. Instead, for Purple Mountains, he made warm, fluid, soft music, music not necessarily aimed at any specific object, music not approaching at any goal, music, frankly, not designed to impress. The pliableness of the approach allowed for the lazy "Snow is Falling in Manhattan", which has no purpose except to remark that snow is falling in Manhattan and that Dave, merely, wants someone to be there. Yes, this is the hurdle I had: I didn't recognize this album's brilliance because I wanted it to go somewhere. There is nowhere to go. Beatitude lies in this moment.
(Jesus, this turned into an essay within an essay for "Purple Mountains".)
Alright, quick ones: the winner used to be Christoph de Babalon's "Hectic Shakes", I love how Babalon's sound burrows and burrows into your soul; see "Endless Inside". The winner probably should have been FEELS' "Post Earth", the best punk album I think I've heard in a while, punk meaning The Clash's "London Calling"-punk (1979) in terms of how varied and intelligent it can be. Just like The Clash, FEELS doesn't really stick to a particular genre, because the goodness of the music isn't in how catchy it is, it's in how it reveals other human beings to us. "Deconstructed" is incredible how the vocalists (I don't know who's Laena, Shannon or Amy) wind through one another demanding salads and hash browns before they start yelling "Just give me a cigarette! JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING CIGARETTE!" over Rudes' hardcore-esque drums. "Awful Need" is more in line with traditional rock where Laena, I assume, wails,
All is underway, no one is afraid, but everyone is frightened
before chanting, "Awful need of self, I've seen it, / awful need of self." "Tollbooth" is sludgey, beginning with "Got nothing / better to do, / bury yourself in a doctor's lap, / find something, / more pills for you", before either Laena or Shannon on rhythm guitar snake their way into the track, before they start shredding and Laena screeches "EVERYTHING'S GREAT! ALL THE WORLD'S IN FLAMES!" Then Laena, returning to her stupor, delivers the punchline: "It's not funny / at all." "Post Earth" is not dissimilar to Rosie Tucker's "UTOPIA NOW!", which I touched on recently; it is secretly about the anxiety of living in a world that is not quiiiiiite right.
It's actually really underrated, wait. I'm disappointed that I put Babalon above FEELS for so long. But it's for a write-up another day.
Part of me would feel bad if I didn't talk about I Love Your Lifestyle's "The Movie", which I return to quite often. I don't have anything against angst, but the purpose of art is to relate it to the greater struggle of being human. There's the singer's howl (seriously, where are the credits? credit yourselves, motherfuckers, you guys are great), in "Adrenaline Rush to Kill My Crush", "We share awkward silences, / my hopelessness, get beaten around by everyone - / why can't my words come out right for once?" There's the slow montage of the title track, where, without relief, he sings, "finally we're back in our safe zone, / we never know what could have been (outdoors?), / familiar faces would be a nightmare / even though no one would care." The album's best attribute is that it indeed has a filmic quality to it, as the singer unravels embarrassing situation after situation, under great hooks, too.
The decade
The coda for the last 2010s list more-or-less still holds up. I don't really know what happened, but the 2010s is when music took itself very seriously, perhaps too seriously. I'm only going to list one fun album each decade: Breeders, "Last Splash" (1993). J Dilla, "Donuts" (2006). What's the fun album of the 2010s? "Coloring Book"? I dunno, that's about Jesus. "channel ORANGE" (2012)? Dunno, too dramatic. Even in the realm of dance music, Jamie xx's "In Colour" (2015) carries itself with such intensity. In contrast, I have a fun album for the 2020s: 2023's "Cartwheel". If not that, Charli XCX's "Brat" (2024).
It's a headscratcher, surely. Every decade has its own set of problems, so it's weird the 2010s dwelled on its own. I do think the rise of social media has something to do with it. I haven't experienced this so maybe I'm making this up, but I can kinda see some kid listening to "Madvillainy" (2004) and think, "Wow, this is corny." So if you don't want to be corny, you have to wear an air of gravitas. It's interesting how this self-seriousness coincides with Christopher Nolan's ascendancy and his aesthetic grittiness; you can see it, too, in the music videos of "Lemonade" and "4:44".
This was also a very ego-filled decade. Bands still ruled in the 2000s, but even the rap championed during that time was character-oriented. Ghostface was not an actual drug dealer; I mean, sure, maybe in his past life, but not in "Supreme Clientele" (2000). Eminem and 50 Cent were playful, and even Kanye had a cartoon aesthetic with his Dropout Bear! It is very interesting that after two songwriting classics ("kaputt", "Idler Wheel") that rap mutated and became very introspective and first-person oriented, which trend began because of Kanye, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" (2010) and Drake, "Take Care" (2011).
Well, we see how that ended: it ends with 2018's "God's Favorite Customer" and 2019's "Purple Mountains", which are positively depressing. It is amazing how the Pandemic, the Pandemic of all things, reversed this trend. It's nice that the torched "Purple Mountains" leads to Swift's cautiously optimistic "betty". It's like a rejuvenation of life.
The 2010s were a very, very interesting decade, but I don't know how much of it I want to re-listen. Music does, indeed, have to be fun. It has to transform. There is some element of transgression in it. The 2010s were very blunt and I don't know what to think about that. Well, the music's great, so who cares I guess.
