Rock Music Gets Good Enough Again in The Tens (Thanks to Nuke York, etc. No Thanks to Mac DeMarco et al.)

The 250 Rock and Roll and Folk Albums of the 21st Century So Far. Part Three.

2011-2015

For rock and folk music exclusively, the first half of the 2010s was decent. Not a golden age or anything—having Mac DeMarco and/or Burger Records around would bring any era’s rock GPA down—but certainly an improvement over the grim years of 2007-10, when the pretty understandable backlash to the Strokes et al. resulted in wave after wave of neutered Pet Sounds and Virgin Suicides-core. I like both chickens and eggs, so I don’t pretend to favor any particular theory regarding the prevalent haziness of so much art made after, say, 2007. Did the opioid crisis contribute to vaporwave? Or was AM radio a popular thing, and it still is? My off-the-cuff answers would be: “seems likely," and "also yes.” All I can say for certain is that, as the new got wavier, I didn’t love it. But I'd also come up around enough older musicians, who'd curdled into knee-jerk haters-of-everything-new, that I had a sense of how I didn't want to be in my thirties. Anyway, it’s not like “angular guitars” were an inherent virtue. The important thing is that, though the haze was still the dominant mode of expression within rock music (and would continue to be so until very recently), there were enough fireflies shaking their bioluminescence to justify going out at night. 

This means that listing 2011-2015 posed the opposite problem as the half-decade before. Instead of struggling to find enough albums to fill a year, narrowing selections down to manageable proved to be real hellish. Once Iceage and Total Control (not to mention all the Nuke York bands) hit the lower-middle-tier big time, the “underground” became an embarrassment of surly riches and it kills me to think of the albums which I near-arbitrarily had to leave on the cutting room floor. 

(I'm aware that punk/hardcore was picking up well before Denmark and Australia started sending their best. There was some very fine Youth Attack music I had to cut, as well as a bunch of bands that sounded like Jerry's Kids then and now, who I didn't cry about cutting in the slightest.)

2014 in particular was insane, with more classics than one (unless one is one of those YouTube commenters who seem to think "nostalgic" is a complimentary term) would have thought.

This culling was made only slightly easier by pop entering a phase that was almost as uniformly sonically uninteresting as it was lyrically cruel. While many critics I respect saw value in the works of The Weeknd, Kreayshawn, Riff Raff, and A$AP Rocky, I did not. Lest anyone think I applied rockist standards against any of those, I assure you that it was the opposite. I hate the pompous self-pitying misanthropy of The Weeknd because I hate everything Trent Reznor has done post-The Downward Spiral. I find the novelty rap of the Tens grating for the same reasons I felt the same about Andrew WK. I'm only as indifferent to A$AP Rocky as I was to Motley Crüe; one nursery rhyme music about banging out strippers is as good as another.

A lot of rap’s issues of the time were caused by it being a transitional period where old standards of lyricism were still somewhat applied while the call of a chanted refrain was coming from the future. The middle ground was painful to listen to. So give thanks to Chief Keef, born from the based god skull of Lil B, who freed an entire generation from the prison of rhyming; allowing for a near decade of radio rap that was zero steps removed from your average The Spits album. And I will never look down my nose at anything that sounds like The Spits. Still, popular music isn’t my thing. So, for this list, I ignored radio rap in the exact proportion that I ignored radio rock. I am possibly wrong—and definitely irrelevant—because of this. But I figure there are enough correct and/or relevant list-makers out there. Why crowd the field?

I do feel the need here to add one caveat to the above negativity, and to any similar denouncements throughout the list. As caveats go, it’s an important one, so listen up, ok? NONE OF MY CRITICISMS APPLY TO ANY ART OR ARTISTS AS THEY ARE CONSUMED BY TEENAGERS. Meaning; I don’t think anything has to be “smart” or even “good” (whatever either word might mean within the context of pop or rock) to be soul-nourishing for someone between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. It’s an entirely different metric, and not one I feel like parsing or arguing against. Even the politics of a song change when consumed by a teenager. Misogyny (or misandry, sure) might not be healthy for a teenager to hear but the reality is that, when one is in one’s teens, the opposite sex is very much a foreign shore, one that can seem hostile no matter how PC the lyrics one consumes are. While I didn’t have the Weeknd as a bb girl-fear-er, I had Afghan Whigs and Pretty Hate Machine. And I very much needed either as I paced my bedroom, recounting the various humiliations that were visited upon me during any given study hall. So, if you were fourteen and Kreayshawn gave you some sense of self, then Kreayshawn will always, in your heart, be as good as the Beatles. And that’s cool by me. This list’s judgments are to be considered the POV of an adult. An adult disinclined towards nostalgia, but not with a monopoly on your own peculiar-taste past. 

Second Caveat:

There’s no Death Grips on this list. It’s not because Death Grips' audience seemed to consist almost entirely of adult Irish-Americans furious at their own failing to find work with the city and/or college kids still mad at their dads for failing to get Steve Aoki to DJ their Bar Mitzvahs. Indeed, I purchased The Money Store on iTunes when it came out and gave it many tries. Death Grips probably share the No.1 slot with Ween in terms of influence on rock/rock-adjacent musicians under the age of forty. And I fully credit the band for at least sounding like they themselves weren’t bored with what they were making, which couldn't be said for a lot of the alt-popular music of the time. All the same, all Death Grips' songs sound like Converge to me; I respect the parts, but I don't trust that the whole is about anything much more than fuck all.

Further caveats and listings can be found HERE (part 1: 2000-2005) and HERE (part 2: 2006-2010).

With that... it's one big room, and it's full of bad bitches. Let's get to it, boppers.

February

Frank Ocean - Nostalgia, Ultra (self-released) Everything he did after was genius and emblematic of the best of the decade’s signature sounds. As I don’t care much about genius or the decade’s signature sounds (haze, nostalgia for a too-recent past, opiated sad/drift), I think I’ll stick to this one; the ungenius one (relatively speaking… it’s still plenty smart), the one where Ocean doesn’t exist entirely in his own inner world, occasionally even getting dressed and leaving his apartment. 

March

Iceage - New Brigade (Dais) A debut album so nice, eight different labels released it in one year. Some of those releases were different countries or formats, but some of them weren’t. Hurt feelings abounded, as our fair-haired cutters traced the “DiJ 4-Evah” on their black jeans and otherwise sold their bad boy debut like a Florida timeshare. The result was them being the best boy band of the Aughts. The post-dippy/indie blogosphere wanted another Joy Division but got Chaos DK instead. A boot-baby blur of perfect ur-post-punk ensued. Followed by a maelstrom of white leather & cowpunk sensuality. Followed by a suppository of mid-tier celebrity dating. Right now, Iceage’s Dorian Greywolfen frontman, Elias, is most likely being torn apart by a rabid pack of Jenna Ortega fans. Which will be sad but at least we’ll always have two separate months in 2011, when two versions of New Brigade were released in America alone, and all the kids (not working for those two labels) were united. 

Raphael Saadiq - Stone Rollin’ (Columbia) Expertly written and produced songs, lovingly arranged and performed, by ex-Tony! Toni! Toné! soul snatcher Raphael Saadiq and a who’s who of some of the finest session cats and kittens on the neo soul spectrum. Saadiq and engineer/mixer (and co-producer) Charles Brungardt approached the album with the intention of capturing the grit of old soul/R&B albums while still sounding modern, even new. If they’d succeeded in this intention, it’s likely that Stone Rollin’ would be a grand bit of pastiche; something as good as, or a little better than, whatever soul product Mick Ronson might sweat out in an afternoon, in between the No.99th daily brush of his locks and brush No.100. It’d be good. We’d all enjoy it. Instead, the two producers—I believe intentionally but wouldn’t care if it wasn’t the case—made a truly outside of the time-stream, album, where hearing the songs as a whole is impossible to do on headphones because every note from every instrument is recorded and mixed as if that particular instrument was a narcissistic lead singer who refused to leave the mixing session. And every one of those instruments, down to the triangle, absolutely demands the listener’s attention. I have never heard a piece of recorded music where the decay of the hi-hat sizzle is given the same priority as the singer’s voice or the lead guitar which seems to be playing just a crabwalk away. I have never heard a kick drum make mouth sounds; nor the material of the kick itself so much inside my ear canal that I can feel the calfskin lick its lips. I have never heard so many gorgeous notes—played so expertly on the top-est-tier of vintage instruments, through historically accurate tubes and amplifiers, all recorded in the same studio—sound as if, should they touch one of the other gorgeous notes or instruments, everyone involved will be immediately cast into Hell. For all of Stone Rollin’s adherence to classic sounds and embracing of 2011 studio technology, no soul record has sounded so much like mid-period Einstürzende Neubauten or a tabletop wargame.  

May

T.V. Smith - Coming In To Land (Boss Tuneage) T.V. Smith’s first band, The Adverts, sported a melodicism that, of the Class of ‘77, was equalled only by Buzzcocks and (occasionally) Generation X. With the canonically revered Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts released in 1978, followed by the supposedly bad—but only because a lot of punks are super dumb—Cast of Thousands, the Adverts were responsible for two of the truly great punk albums (two and a half truly great punk albums if we consider T.V. Smith’s vocal lines to be indirectly responsible for half the melodies on Jay Reatard’s Blood Visions, which we do). Lacking the foresight to either embrace post-punk, die young, or thrive as a caricature, the Adverts frontman has consistently made relentlessly tuneful albums which were too pretty and/or folkily earnest to be entirely “punk,” while being too… T.V. Smith-y to really pass as anything but punk. None of this seems to bother T.V. Smith much. He either never much wanted to be on any murals anyway, or he’s too hot and bothered about the walls of Babylon crashing in around him to worry about being the next (or last) Paul Weller.

Even here, on Boss Tuneage, a label which takes melodic punk as seriously as an NHS heart attack, Smith’s sweetly cutting tenor, with only a tickle of rasp after all these years, still stands out amongst the label roster’s multitude of Frankie Stubbses. Over hard rock channelling of Adverts-anthemics and heavy folk rock that splits the difference between Big Guitar and Billy Bragg-adociousness, Smith rails against fast fashion, mass surveillance, historical lies, and—in what’s arguably most reflective of the man’s ethos—false hope and the lure of postured hopelessness both. Throughout, he’s witty, resiliently distraught, and pretty much life affirming as all hell; making world weariness sound enviable, being T.V. Smith Vs. World like it’s a job. Which it is. And if he’s not destined to be among the world beaters—even if he’s destined to be with us among the opposite—so what? Beats working.

Weekend Nachos - Worthless (Relapse Records) Why Weekend Nachos instead of any number of the other negative nancys making similar grunting noises? I dunno. Why does simply the song title,"Old Friends Don't Mean Shit," tickle me in the same way Sheer Terror's "Just Can't Hate Enough" (or even Slang's "Life Made Me Hardcore") does, while Nails calling an album "You Will Never Be One of Us" makes me want to throw a bonfire of powerviolence two-sided longsleeves, disco-demolition-style? Why does Worthless feel spiced and so many of the album's peers feel like boiled meat? Got me, man. Why are the Irish cool and the English a bit sketchy? Why was The New Girl delightful while Scrubs was insufferable? I dunno. Some things are just exactly so. (tbc, for the purposes of this discussion, Weekend Nachos is The New Girl.)

June

Hollie Cook - s/t (Mr. Bongo) Reggae/Tropical Pop singer Hollie Cook is the closest thing the UK has to (non-evil) royalty. She was in the reformed Slits, her mom sang backups in Culture Club, and her dad is justifiably famous for, among other things, having discovered Bananarama and, of particular interest to readers of this newsletter, being a long-time collaborator with Vic Godard of Subway Sect. Most notably, Paul Cook was instrumental in giving the world Hollie Cook. Cook’s string of excellent solo albums begins here, with nine slices of Prince Fatty produced ; each one a finely wrought collection of, depending on Cook’s mood, sweeter-than-sweet roots reggae, lilting lovers rock, or Sade-tinged & new wavey 2-Tone pop.  

Dave Alvin - Eleven Eleven (Yep Rock Records) If you think I'm immune to the same impulses that make men my age claim Die Hard as a Christmas movie, quote the Big Lebowski, post about Sicario, and generally dream dreams of masculinity entirely divorced from both lifestyle and build, you're wrong. Well, you're half wrong. I don't do any of that shit I just listed. If only partially because my mama verbally cauterized the corny right out of me, and partially because my self-loathing extends to guys just like myself but slightly different.

But you're all the way wrong when it comes to Dave Alvin. Catch me rewindin' and cryin' the final scene of the final episode of Justified, and you can inject this grizzled Blaster-boy-fantasy straight into my veins.

August

Total Control - Henge Beat (Iron Lung) Mikey Young & his Control are single handedly responsible for a generation of punk/post-punk singers deluding themselves that they could get by on sounding disaffected alone. Which is a shame as there’s nothing dis or affected about Total Control. Rather, these Australian alienationists don’t hide their hearts in the slightest; they love motorik so much that they can’t wait to get to the next round of it, they love John Foxx-era Ultravox so much they’re practically villains in a Bowie song, and they love the world so much that they want to sound like it, the next world, and all the other worlds in the multiverse all at once. 

September

Fatoumata Diawara - Fatou (World Circuit) I somewhat haltingly interviewed Diawara in 2013 (note to self: learn French) and she was very patient while trying to explain, over a truly garbage phone connection, the complicated nature of Mali’s then-nascent instability. In the ensuing years, the situation in the guitar hero’s country has gone from suck to suckest, while her own albums have grown more ambitious and electrically diverse. Still, here, on her international debut, Diawara’s pristine stringwork and restrained-but-soaring lilt is lovely enough that you’d almost think that the universe was kind and might remain so. 

October

Trapped Under Ice - Big Kiss Goodnight (Reaper Records) Not being super invested in Actually Popular toughguy hardcore, I outsourced the question to Fred Pessaro and this was his pick, calling it the “blueprint for modern hardcore.” Both his choice and assessment feel correct, and I can’t imagine anyone more qualified to speak on it, so Trapped Under Ice it is!

Lou Reed & Metallica - Lulu (Warner Brothers / Vertigo) Strange, sure, but eminently listenable and better than anything else either act put out this century. Anyone who uses it as a punchline is lazy at best, a fucking jerkoff at worst. 

November

Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow (Fish People) “Imma fuck that snowman.” - Catherine Bush

Brain F# - Sleep Rough (Sorry State) Inarguably the only album where early Replacements region-rock is played like the region it’s from is Kyoto and not North Carolina. Garage pop-punk melodies (like, a ton of them) buried under so much guitar squall it conjures up shoegaze, shoelaces worn as headbands, and getting kicked in the face by a centipede-worth of dirty Converse sneakers. 

January

Lasher Keen - Berserker (Pesanta Urfolk) The Wicker Man but sexier and from the perspective of the druids. If, as a rule, neo-folk didn’t subsist entirely on a buffet of tedium and dicks… If, instead of sloth and will-to-zzzzzzzzzz, anyone involved in neo folk had even an iota of personality, and if those impossible characters made music that was Phantom-of-the-Paradise awesome (but three times as horny), this is what neo folk would sound like.

February

Sinéad O’Connor - How About I Be Me (and You Be You)? (One Little In…) If you think for a second that the music media wanted anything close to wellness for one of the Top Ten greatest rock/pop singers of the last fifty years, go read the faint praise attached to this album. Marvel, if you will, the middling three star reviews, with their acknowledgments of O’Connor’s genius tempered with commentary about the “clunkiness” of the lyrics (not a single sung line of which would make anyone blink if they were in a popular-punk song or even on, say, a Marvin Gaye album). Marvel all the more at the accusations of effervescence and whimsy, often sharing the same column space as raised-eyebrow digressions regarding O’Connor’s use of meds and/or religion. Marvel to the point of choking at the temerity of English typists taking O’Connor to task for not being appropriately subtle in her calling out of FUCKING BONO. 

Fuck us all; a bunch of lousy parasites almost to the last. How About I Be Me (and You Be You)? is as good a pop-rock album that’s been released this century. God bless O’Connor, God bless her backing band of Adam-less Ants (each of whom could write fuckin’ Black Parade or whatever in their sleep), and God keep that voice. Considering both how the world showed its appreciation for O’Connor’s gift, and considering just the pure, splendid force of her instrument, you can hardly blame the Mystery for wanting that silver closer to home.

April

White Lung - sorry (Deranged) Until they just-asking-questions-ed themselves right off a rhetorical cliff, Domino Records’ eventual reason to cry (AKA White Lung) made two amazing pimple-popping-punk albums, full of minimalist L7 vocal hooks and some of the squirreliest guitar lines of their respective years. This was the second of the two. It consists of ten songs, each one a hand-bump of candied strychnine, and the whole thing lasts nineteen minutes. A lesson in getting out while getting is good, easier taught than learned. 

billy woods - History Will Absolve Me (Backwoodz Studioz) Not the beginning of billy woods’ career but the place where his style—one part Killer of Sheep, but funny, and one part The Death of Stalin, but as documentary (still funny)—clicked, both with himself and a select few (particularly readers of Blockhead’s blog). Just successful enough upon its release to keep woods from cashing in his face pixels, the resonant frequencies of History Will Absolve Me expand concentrically with every year. So much so that you’d think the album rollout-into-promotional-cycle was eternal. So pandemic are the vibes that the CIA had to eventually hire psyop-tic reddit nerds to slanderously claim that an hour and three minutes of woods rappity-rapping hard enough to make rent—and the career which that rapping made financially viable—isn’t rap at all. As if the end goal of language was Russian literature rather than wooing, joshing, and/or evening scores. Slander aside, it’s hard to blame our overlords for being scared. When History Will Absolve Me is popular enough, we all get jetpacks, then honest friends. When every household has a copy of History Will Absolve Me, it’ll be a new dawn; the opposite of over for all you hoes; the gulag for all pimps and johns.

May

Rosenkopf - s/t (Wierd) A post-apocalyptic spaghetti-western power trio made up of one dude from psychedelic nightmares Dawn of Humans, one dude from Nuke York tigerbeaters Thriller, and one gal from crust-punk heroes Detestation. While it’s got hints of peace punk, drum ‘n’ bass, minimalist Godflesh, and New Romantic Black Metal, it’s mainly got hints of nothing that came before and nothing that’s come since. 

(I’ll must add that the above referenced Dawn of Humans put out an LP in 2015 which is as good/absurd as anything on this list, and I am only shoehorning it in here because I simply cannot add another NYC album or it’ll look like I’m working for the Nuke York Chamber of Commerce.)

Rye Rye - Go! Pop! Bang! (N.E.E.T. / Interscope) As any Art Brute will tell you; if you’re going to put either “bang” or exclamation points in your album title, you better bring enough of the bang! to justify. Rye Rye did just that. Even as other lists—inferior to this one—might say otherwise.

Largely recorded in 2009 but delayed three years for 20th Century reasons, Go! Pop! Bang!’s merits have only grown more self evident over time.  If anything in the “hyperpop” microgenre had approached the levels of hyper or pop exhibited here, there wouldn’t have been a need to write entire Mark Fisher explainers why it was enjoyable to listen to. The Baltimore club-rapper’s collection of rave-uppers and nitrous pop sounds anachronistic only once, when Rye Rye says she doesn’t need adderall, but otherwise double-dutches through time like a Tardis that runs on bubblegum. I can only assume that it’s been kept out of the indie/aughts/nau-teens revival by some combination of current/collective bad taste and the suppressive guilty consciences of any who share responsibility in tanking Rye Rye in the first place. Pop, like the rest of the industries, is cruel, but it still grates to see thieves (Gaga) and mediocrities (I dunno… the rest of ‘em?) graduate into legend and respectability, while the fizzy oddballs who were the brightest spots of this pop era have wikipedia pages that end in ellipses mid-decade.   

LIFE HACK: If you put on Laurel Halo’s debut, Quarantine, and then, on equidistant speakers, play Go! Pop! Bang! at full volume, not only do the combined elements sound exactly like the last Turnstile LP, but also a shirtless Brandon Yates will appear in your living room. If you ask him where his gold is hidden, he has to tell you. 

June

Spectrum Road - s/t (Palmetto Records) I wasn’t going to include any jazz on this list. Not because I don’t think jazz matters. It does, if any of this does (???), but it’s always very weird when there’s a Top 500 Albums of All Time list and, like, nestled between Taylor Swift and Slayer is Kind of Blue. Just throws the inanity of the whole enterprise into a relief I don’t think any of us care to fuss about. That said, this is a bonkers good album of jazz-rock fusion, inspired by Tony Williams Lifetime, starring Vernon Reid (of not being a glamour boy, but instead being fierce, fame), Jack Bruce (the only member of Cream who’s going to Heaven), John Medeski (hep cat), and Cindy Blackman (rampaging monster of drumming despite holding her sticks like the dude in the Zombies or, like, Brian Chase). While I also don’t include jazz on the list because writing about it reveals me to be a moron, I promise that if this came out on Temporary Residence, your uncle in an OM shirt would own five copies. 

August

Hank Wood and the Hammerheads - Go Home (Toxic State) In contemporary underground punk rock singing, men no longer imitate the vocal stylings of Iggy Pop. They either imitate the capitalist-realism-no-alt deadpan of Total Control’s Mikey Young or the come-and-get-me-coppers yip-yap of Mr. Henry Wood. Wood, for his part, went neck and neck with Iggy in terms of shirtlessness but, even while challenging himself to distill the Stooges’ lyricbook to as few syllables as humanly possible, the chief Hammerhead further differed from Pop by throwing himself around with an evident gracefulness which implied that the cool jerk could actually dance. The organ driven Hammerheads could have been bigger than Oasis* if they’d tried even once. Same goes for the band Wood played drums for; the Hammerheads’ kissing cousins, Crazy Spirit - s/t (Toxic State). Except, in terms of stadium acts they could have been bigger than, substitute Rudimentary Peni for Oasis. Also nobody imitates the vocals of Crazy Spirit’s Walker Behl, because nobody can afford the cost/risk of having their larynx surgically replaced with Romani-cursed snakeskin. 

*ok not that big. But pretty big. 

September

Treponem Pal - Survival Sounds (Juste Une Trace) “WEAPON OF MASS INSTRUCTION / MUSIC WEAPON OF MASS LIBERATION / MUSIC SOME THEY LIKE IT DREAD, SOME THEY LIKE IT HOT SOME THEY LIKE IT TOUGH, SOME THEY LIKE IT SOFT SURVIVAL MUSIC / SURVIVAL MUSIC DREADLOCKS SOLDIERS, INDUSTRIAL FREAKS UNITED ROCKERS STREET UNDERGROUND MUSIC SWEET UNDERGROUND SURVIVAL MUSIC ALL THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS ARE BEAUTIFUL ALL THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS ARE STRONG ALL THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS ARE BEAUTIFUL ALL THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS ARE STRONG SURVIVAL MUSIC REBEL MUSIC HAS NO FLAG SURVIVAL MUSIC OPEN UP YOUR MIND HIP HOP RAPPERS, RHYTHM N'SOUL HEADBANGERS, METAL ROCK N'ROLL SURVIVAL MUSIC JUST RELEASE YOUR MIND SURVIVAL MUSIC OPEN UP YOUR MIND SURVIVAL MUSIC ALL THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS ARE BEAUTIFUL ALL THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS ARE STRONG ALL THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS ARE BEAUTIFUL ALL THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS ARE STRONG SURVIVAL MUSIC UNITED NATION UNDER A GROOVE UNITED NATION IT'S ALL THE SAME GROOVE SURVIVAL MUSIC SURVIVAL MUSIC / SURVIVAL MU…”

You get the point. The accent only makes bang harder.

Hellwell - Beyond The Boundaries Of Sin (Shadow Kingdom Records) Manilla Road’s Mark Shelton channels a vampiric (and indeterminately European) Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to intone Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark over a rare collection of smokes on the water he bought from a shadowy knickknack shop he wandered into (and which he could never find again no matter how long he searched) on some thunder-struck Saturday night. A feverishly funtastic freak-o-metal album. Just don’t let the drums trigger you, lest your soul be consigned too highly in the mix... forever. 

Dum Dum Girls - End of Daze (Sub Pop) Never as hazy as even their advocates would have it, Dum Dum Girls gave the world of gauze-garage one last kiss off. In just five songs of almost muscular reverie, Kristin Kontrol mourns both the glitter fading and the feelings still hanging around. The songs swoon hard enough to induce drama and heartbreak in any high schooler worth their salt. In that, if you’re an innocent looking to see how they get down on the dark end of the street, End of Daze works as an excellent primer.  If you have nothing to regret (yet), it’s loverly on its merits, and beats the shit out of Mac DeMarco’s artificially induced nostalgia from the same year (and every untucked year since). Factoring in the Strawberry Switchblade cover, the EP counts as an internship in a certain way of living.

Conversely, as implied earlier; with her sunglass-usage more jacket-sleeve-Didion than go-go-boot good times, Kontrol’s reverie has always carried a touch of flint. Meaning that the induced nostalgia here is a bait-and-switch; Dee Dee’s real steez is real memory of an actual world. If DeMarco’s magic hour bullshit is about implanted sublimity, performed by an idiot’s idea of J.J. Cale, then End of Daze is hypnotherapy conducted by the most spiritually itchy ghost in the Brill Building. So, you know, buyer beware. If you’ve managed either a life dominated by kindness or the kind of blacking out that takes, you’ll probably only trace the mist on your shower curtain for as long as the EP lasts, then get on with your day. Easy Peasy. If you have ever been cruel, or previously been young in a way you can recall? woof. Good luck! Might want to clear your afternoon schedule. 

October

Menace Ruine - Alight In Ashes (Union Finale) For my solitary piece of writing for Jezabel’s short-lived music site (I can’t remember what it was called), I wrote a very-much-of-its-time essay about separating art from the artist. I advocated for not doing it, though I can’t really remember if I meant it. Or if I just needed the $250 that month and was happy to keep my name off of any lists for another six months. Let’s say, “a little column A, a little column B.” The piece was neither bad nor good. It was social justice war-content. Gavin Mcinnes even tweeted that a girl must have written it. Which was as flattering as any gendered compliment can be when paid to a girl by someone whose bloodstream is 80% vodka. Anyway, the only part of the piece I can remember writing is the part where I said that there is absolutely no earthly reason to listen to Myrkurr so long as Menace Ruine existed. I compared this Canadian duo of cascadian drone lovers to Buffy Sainte-Marie as well. While the second comparison has lost a bit of its luster, I stand by the sonic point of reference. As neither Geneviève Beaulieu and S. de La Moth are likely to be exposed as false will-o-the-wisps anytime soon, the twosome are the only ones of the aforementioned artists to make it to 2026 with dignity intact. Therefore, while I don’t have the online proof right in front of me, I told you so! 

November

Metá Metá - MetaL MetaL (Mais Um) São Paulo jazz & psychatropical samba outfit manipulate waves in the new, no, and seismic styles, and do so with enough noir heat to take the top three-to-five buttons off your French linen. 

Maria & The Mirrors - Vision Quest (51 Records) If the idea of Kid Creole and the Coconuts making a power electronics album appeals, or if you’ve ever looked at Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X and thought “pretty cool… I wish I could switch out Pope X with Stacey Q,” welcome to your new favorite album. If neither of those two thoughts have occurred to you, or they have but you weren’t that into it, this album might be a bit much. 

December

The Blood of Heroes - The Waking Nightmare (Ohm Resistance) Drum ‘n’ bass ‘n’ dub ‘n’ industrial metal fans rejoice; the Godflesh dude, Pere Ubu bassist, Dr. Israel (no relation to country… relax), Disfear singer, Merzbow collaborator, and guitarist from J.J. Paradise Players Club super-group of your dreams is here. Or was. Don’t worry. Like one of those tsunami butterflies that have figured so heavily in your other dreams, they captured the heroic flap-flap of its wings in the studio.

P.S. Speaking of J.J. Paradise Players Club, next year's album by PIGS, You Ruin Everything, would be on this list, easy, if I didn't have way too many NYC acts and I hadn't been in a band with the drummer (the aptly named & heaven sent J. Paradise).

January

Sleaford Mods - Austerity Dogs (Harbinger Sound) Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn have been around long enough, and have mouthed off enough, to be objects of some smug and/or righteous disdain. Which is fine; they’re adults who spent years picking fights, and ought to be able to handle being called fakes, libs, and/or just old and white by online phantoms with hammers and sickles in their bios. I happen to dig the duo's continuous catalog, as they entertain New Model Army melodicism and especially as Fearn expands his own sonic palate to match the increased mental-health-history vulnerability of Williamson’s beat-down poetry. You don’t gotta agree. All I’ll demand is that this fucker, 2013’s Austerity Dogs, be acknowledged for the beast it is. And, further, I request it be acknowledged just how laugh-in-shock absurd the album’s nakedly regional chutzpah felt at the time, and how even the lazy Fall comparisons fell short, and how nearly every single UK band who Sprechgesang to the top of charts in Austerity Dogs' wake owe this duo their livelihoods.

And, you know what? I don’t care if they made peace. IDLES may be the nicest guys on the planet (and I have it on good authority that they are), Sleaford Mods were right about them and, for longer than most, right about everything else too. (Except in regards to Chumbawumba, who were, in fact, pretty political.) 

Cloud Rat - Moksha (Halo of Flies / IFB Records / React With Protest / 7 Degrees) Michigan “grindpunk” outfit’s first LP. The grind never mushes, the song parts number enough to get the job done and do it weirdly, and there’s nary a part too many. The grind-doom cover of Neil Young’s “The Needle And The Damage Done”  is, miraculously, novel without being a novelty. As perfect an album, in its fashion/desolation, as Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.

February

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away (Bad Seed Ltd.) Nick Cave’s last good year and possibly last truly great album, before the reverse-muse trinity—trauma, respectability, and soundtrack work—took over and made the man and his art increasingly decent. Before the drummers were sidelined for more atmosphere, more viola, more childrens choirs. Before the horny lil' devil on Cave's shoulder was replaced by another angel, until the only thing being whispered into Nick Cave's ears was liturgical woo woo and dogeared essays from the Quillette. Before critics and his fans decided that Nick Cave was no longer their fetish; he was their religious icon. Before those fans decided that they liked him best as a doll after all; a doll labeled “pull my string and I’ll tell you something beautiful!” Before fate decreed that Cave—who’d previously offered advice by either sartorial example or self-care counterexample—should spend the rest of his grieving days tossing out florid poetry to be stitched onto throw pillows. Poetry to be admired for its therapeutic value, by a fanbase no longer populated by amphetamine sex-goths but instead spilling over with underdressed steam-punks, black-clad Disney-adults well practiced in the use of the term “baby bat,” and secretly-cultist agnostics left bereft by Netflix’s early cancellation of Sandman.

I don’t doubt that Cave could have become conservative (or libertarian, or whatever) even if none of the bad shit happened. Maybe he would, or maybe he’d be making worse music but in a keffiyeh. Regardless, given a wish machine and the responsibility to reshape Nick Cave’s timeline (with the admittedly weird caveat that something bad still had to happen), I would wish for nothing worse than for Cave to become a rightwing asshole. Not my first choice, but preferable to how it went. If I had my way, if Nick Cave still ended up palling around with sketchy religionists while reciting Frederick Seidel poetry, he’d be doing so only because he was old and essentially English. Or better yet, for no reason at all. So long as Cave continued in the same vein of his Dig, Lazarus, Dig!-to-Push the Sky Away hot streak—two of the best albums of his career as well as two of the best rock albums of the 21st Century—I’d be out on those Bluesky streets separating the art from the artist like I was the payroll of Big Fencewalking. I’d do it for free. If he brought back Barry Adamson, I’d do it for free-er. If he managed to do it without any advice column or Radiohead-onist in sight, I’d not only defend him, I’d pay the Anglican Church for the privilege. 

March

Hard Skin - Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear (Feral Ward) It speaks to the tolerance of skinheads, the credulousness of skinheads, the indifference of skinheads to whether the Oi! they’re consuming is in line with their various ideologies, or just to the high quality of skinhead rock displayed by the bands Hard Skin and Skinhead, that either band is/was able to play songs that have some fun with some of the most sociopathic humans to ever curb stomp the earth, and to leave the venue afterwards with all their braces intact. That said, as much as I adore Skinhead’s music (which will be discussed in later installments), and respect the band’s ability to match their fanbase’s pathology, it should be noted that they are doing so in a time when skinhead music is as popular as it’s ever been. Which means that the skinheads at shows are now joined by punks, skin-curious rockers, as well as pantywaist poseurs such as myself. While this diversity of audience is no guarantee of peace, the risks are reduced by the influx of kids and outflux of some of the more problematic elements (via death, old age, prison, AA, NA, union hours, etc.). Potential hassles are further smoothed by the fact that Skinhead’s mastermind is Josh Long, a hardcore veteran built like a combination of Joey Swoll and an ‘80s b-cinema prison yard bully.

Hard Skin, on the other hand, did not resemble gym rat brawlers so much as good-for-a-laff punx with the cheek-pinchable physiques of Cocksparrian toddlers. Also, Hard Skin began in 1996. Do you know who went to skinhead shows in 1996? Skinheads, that’s who. Not the kind who populated Morrissey album art either. Sure, half their audiences were punks. Maybe even more than half. But do you know how many skinheads it took to ruin a show in 1996? How low can you count? Point being: the most esteemed half-kidding skinhead band of the time plied their trade—in the face of cops and boneheads, to crowds of adoring wackjobs—with little to protect themselves but Slade choruses to burn, unimpeachable street cred (born of having members of Wat Tyler, Thatcher On Acid and, uh, Lush), and an endless stream of jokes only a Brit or Templars fan would get. They did this for years before making this classic album. Which is a remake of another Hard Skin classic made just months before (it should be noted that all Hard Skin albums are canonical “classics”). Same songs as On the Balls, but with vocal duties taken over by Alison Mosshart, Miki Berenyi (Lush drummer Chris Acland co-founded Hard Skin and played on Hard Nuts and Hard Cunts), Joanna Newsom (!), and a half-dozen other stars of the punk-adjacent-adjacent underground. Could anyone else pull off something so audacious, such a joy to listen to? With enough goodwill banked to get away with the title? Would anyone else try? Fuck no. Some endeavors can be dared only by the best band in the land (fuck off). 

Criaturas - Espiritu de Libertad (Residue Records) UK82 minimalism + righteous, of-the-moment fury + chromatically splendiferous guitars, as vibrant as any music made at the time = one hella relentless, somehow still sprightly, top-tenner d-beat albums of the decade.  

Suicidal Tendencies - 13 (Suicidal Records) As a Suicidal Tendencies album, 13 is better than solid. Taken as a Blue Note Records-style collaboration between Mike Muir & Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, it belongs in the Library of Congress. With a couple tweaks, the album could trade places with the United States Declaration of Independence and not affect the plot of National Treasure in the slightest. 

Cult Favorite - For Madmen Only (Reservoir Sound) Way back in 2008, an Elucid-in-short-pants rapped over Portishead’s “We Carry On,” resulting in critical adulation which got stuck in traffic or maybe just turned around at the Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street station, because first attention texted “heading out now now,” then “on way,” then “in car,” then just left the situation on read (if we’re being generous). 

No idea if, five years later, A.M. Breakups had either Portishead or success in mind when composing the beats for this album, but it doesn’t take a dowsing rod to see some continuation from one deep water running through to another. I was hoping to follow that sentence up with a joke/analogy about the aforementioned continuous stream of influence and inspiration, denial, denialism, the Nile (river in Egypt), and the Nile (song by Pink Floyd). But I’ve been typing and deleting combinations of those words for thirty-five minutes and am beginning to lose the plot, so I think it’s time to call it.  The important thing is that the way that the synths rise, dive, and collapse throughout For Madmen Only, particularly on openers “People’s Temple” and “Technoccult,” shares a well with both “We Carry On” and Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days.” Elucid’s esoteric tastes are well known, and thoroughly exhausted as a topic, so—no matter how energetically he may rasp over A..M. Breakups’ conjurings of those esoterics—I’ll spare you/him too much of that. I’ll simply point out that, in a half-decade lousy with Nitzer Ebb cosplayers, nǔ order pastiche (which I for one don’t recall ordering), and assorted Chvrchkey bvllshit, this rapper/producer duo made a synthicide album to beat the band(s). 

April

Rachid Taha - Zoom (Wrasse) On his 2004 album, Tékitoi?, Rachid Taha’s Arabic-language “Rock el Casbah” was only slightly constrained by the fact that “Rock the Casbah” was the Clash’s most novel song (or at least their most novel good song). That didn’t make it any less a jolting delight the first fifty times you heard it. If the Algerian superstar’s rock and roll felt a bit like an electronic artist’s version of rock—if not rock exactly, then the third thing—that was probably Taha’s intention. Regardless of any of that, this final album by Taha is a rock and roll masterpiece, and I’m using that term in the “London Calling” sense; with zero caveats. In fact, considering that Mick Jones plays guitar on Zoom, any caveats are rendered null and void. With strains of Algerian rai, Australian amphetamine goth (if partially cos goths do love to appropriate those Arabic/South Asian melodies… and rightly so!), and the best Elvis cover since Elvis cosplayed as himself, Zoom is wall-to-wall spaghetti-Eastern bangers. It’s a rocker’s rock album if there ever was one. To paraphrase America’s only king worth a single damn; “that’s alt rai, mama.”  

Xenia Rubinos - Magic Trix (Everlasting / Ba Da Bing Records) Chuck Eddy's Best of 2013 was posted 16 hours ago, and thank goodness it was or I'd have neglected to include this (maybe/sorta/kinda released in 2011 if Discogs, and only Discogs, is to be believed?) real wild child of an album. It's 4AM as I'm editing this and I'm currently two weeks past the deadline I'd set for myself to post this list, so you'll forgive me for getting real reductive and just say "Bjork if she was on Fania Records and was nicer to bartenders" for now (I'll write something less inane real, real soon, so maybe just buy this RIGHT NOW and we can discuss at length at that later date).

July

Daughn Gibson - Me Moan (Sub Pop) In a bout of egalitarianism, I spent a few hours looking for a psychobilly album to include on this list. I am trying to touch on as many of the modes of rockin’ that flapped against prevailing currents. And I did have a few rockabilly pals in the aughts. They were few and far between, and each did follow their rockabilly predestinations by becoming either dead or cops, but one did give me a CDR of 16 Horsepower and, for that, I’m in psychobilly’s debt. Unfortunately, after revisiting about a dozen of the standard bearers of most of the -abilly genres, I (re)discovered that the majority of stray cats and kittens are so faithful to their self-imposed limitations as to be forgettable. To be faceless while dressed as vampiric greasers is no mean feat. I’m all for representation, but I’m sorry to say that we won’t be doing DEI for probable racists and their stand-up basses, no matter how much this list might benefit from more songs about slutty hot-rods.

Luckily, I can support the real-gone-daddy community through Daughn Gibson, whose second album, Me Moan, is a rhinestone mystery train of truth and beauty (with some unreliable narration and pug-ugliness thrown in to keep things popping); a silver surfer on the new wave of the new wave of rockabilly; a comb-in-pocket killer-diller in tune with past, present, and future, and all the essential hops (hip, trip, and sock). Me Moan is what’d happen if Jacques Tourneur had directed Grease 2, if Shooter Jennings’ disco album had worked, if the hero of “Wichita Lineman” had quit his job and opened up a roller rink, if… if… if…  look, I could do this for days. It’s my idea of a good time. 

September

Tal National - Kaani (FatCat Records) Hamadal Moumine Issoufou, official of the Justice Department, the High Court of Niamey, guitarist/leader of Tal National, named his multiethnic perpetual-dance-band after the desert east of Niger. As such, Tal National goes for days. Metaphorically of course (their typical concerts only go for six hours), but they do go long, go sunny, and hot. If one is as rhythmically challenged as I am, one can pretend this is math rock. If one is as mathematically challenged as I am, once can focus on the hi-hat, enjoying its disproving of mere numbers. Or one can treat each circling guitar line as twine to be followed. Not out of the maze, obviously. What did one think I meant by “circling”? Just vibes? If anything, the guitar lines work like will o’ wisps, drawing one further in, towards a center that is also shifty, shifting, possibly in the next song. So, as Tal National goes, so goes the listener, presumably forever. Which is totally cool. You’d have to be some kind of sucker on a schedule to want out. Go to law school if that’s what thrills you, I guess. Hamadal Moumine Issoufou did but, eventually, he still ended up in Tal National. You might do the same, so why stay in school? If one is partial to mazes anyway, Tal National’s will only run you £7. Couple that with no student loans, a clean conscience, and how cool one will be, even in the desert, and we’re talking a real bargain.

October

Chrome Hoof - Chrome Black Gold (Cuneiform Records) While hardly having an encyclopedic knowledge of the oeuvre, I can count on one hand the number of prog-metal-disco bands which feature—either as regular or guest musicians—former and/or future members of Cathedral, Noisettes, Vertical Smile, Bolt Thrower, Miranda Sex Garden, Knifeworld, and/or Carcass. Sadly, only Chrome Hoof’s 2010 album, Crush Depth, was produced by James Ford. Thus cutting down the band’s connection to Geese by a degree. Still, you can’t say that (Cathedral bassist) Leo Smee’s polyphrenic orchestra doesn’t have its fingers in some wild amount of pies. 

Pros indulging their lil’ fingers in muso promiscuity can result in irritating hodgepodge; something to be awed and awww’d at by other musos, while admired from afar, if not farther, by regular humans. Luckily, for a band with so many doom heavy hitters, Chrome Hoof keeps things peppy, bordering on sprightly. Even as the band stretches out, the space-funk never goes further out there than an extended dance 12” would allow. And when a singer wanders onto the set, the band pulls in its tentacles long and tastefully enough that a proper song can take place (albeit a six minute song, with Jeff Walker’s vocal crematorium dueting with Shingai Shoniwa’s coloratura). 

The Love Triangle - Clever Clever (Static Shock / Sorry State) I’d sooner die than double check, but I reviewed this album in 2013 with what I’m pretty sure was an ostensibly positive but wholly condescending write-up. In my defense, my band had just broken up. Thirteen years later, without having listened to the album in probably ten of those, it turns out that I still remember—and either adore now or adored all along—every single song. What a wacky turn of events. Sorry, the Love Triangle, I was mad about something else and I did you wrong. Please take some comfort in the knowledge that, in just seven years, there’d be a hundred bands doing Clever Clever, and doing so with half the verve and one tenth the hooks. Did those inferior bands also do a hundred times better in terms of press coverage and popularity? Don’t worry about it! 

Oranssi Pazuzu - Valonielu (20 Buck Spin) I’m not proud of the fact that my fondness for Hawkwind is, for the most part, theoretical; I love the idea of space rock but when it comes time to get down to the business of listening to it, I usually groove along nicely till the rock part of the song ends and the space part starts, and then I put on “Space Truckin’.” Inclined as I am to make like a Lemmy and leave Hawkwind behind, I don’t generally grok the metal bands who have made a subgenre out of the middle two minutes of “The Psychedelic Warlords.” I’m sure those bands would correct me that their influences come more from King Crimson or Opeth, but I really suggest that they wouldn’t. I’m trying to be nice over here. Anyway, these Finnish mutants eventually went full soundtrack-core but, before they did, they were among the best beyond-the-void tentacle-metal bands going, drawing their sound from black holes, silver machine smashups, and the middle section of “Supernaught.” On their third album, Valonielu,  Oranssi Pazuzu throws enough fuzz on Darth Vader’s walk-out music to remind the listener who their father is, all the while exhibiting a George Lucas-ian understanding of how lasers sound in space. And the space truck may take some backroads, but you never doubt that the alien behind the wheel isn’t on enough stackers to break atmosphere. 

January

Los Monjo - La Vida Que Todos Envidian (Discos MMM / Trabuc Records) A family band who all worked at the same restaurant in Guadalajara (which I know is true cos I once wrote a testimonial for the bands’ visa application) who happened to make the kind of raucous, neolithic Dead Boys, garage punk that, in a perfect world, would have made those wimps at Burger Records walk off a pier of their own choosing. 

February

PyPy - Pagan Day (Slovenly Recordings) PyPy (pronounced as if your demanding two slices of pie) features members of vice loving and loved-by-VICE punks CPC Gangbangs (with cultist rockers Red Mass being the bridge between bands) and all-angles dance commanders Duchess Says. The Montreal collective makes blues of the shocking variety, taking what they need from acid rock (freedom, a couple pedals, strychnine) and the Beastie Boys “Sabotage” video (mainly the intro, bridge, mustaches), while decrying there being “too much cocaine being in the streets” in a way that implies that they know just the straws to clean those streets up. Unlike the stoner rockers and/or garage rockers the band shares some passing resemblance with, PyPy play their muscular riffs more hungry than fat; like they just need enough strength to pry the copper wiring out, and—in direct contrast to the bubble-garage, shorts ‘n’ shades ‘n’ predation that Burger Records was flooding the streets with at the time—they refuse to play it cool at all. 

March

Nothing - Guilty of Everything (Relapse Records) One of the five (tops) shoegaze bands worth a single damn. Don’t think for a second that I don’t hold a grudge against Dominic Palermo for inspiring a generation of depressive pillheads to take the second easiest way out. On the other hand, Guilty of Everything does sound like the thick smoke of an inside-job planetarium collapse, populated by the ghosts of firemen and their coke dealers. And, in line with Palermo being a buff of both dead poets and their accompanying ideations, this album treats the Dorothy Parker poem, Resumé, as a sonic laundry list: razors, rivers, acid, drugs, guns, nooses, gas and, ultimately, choosing to live (for now or for now, depending on the song).

Dex Romweber Duo - Images 13 (Bloodshot Records) In the entry for Daughn Gibson, I mentioned how dire most rockabilly of the last couple decades is. As soon as I typed that, I felt a cold, ghostly slap across my face. Might have been the wind from an open window, but, judging from the pearl snap shaped mark it left, the slap probably came from the ghost of either former Flat Duo Jets guitarist, Dex Romweber, or his equally gone sister, Sara, reminding me from beyond the blue moon that I am a damnable fool who oughta know better. And I do know better, because this beachcraft bonanza of crooned doom, not-fade-away guitar scorch, and jet-fueled big boppers told me so.  

Horseback - Piedmont Apocrypha (Three Lobed Recordings)  The saying “this is not my first rodeo” implies that there was a first rodeo; an ur-rodeo, as the continental shelves bucked, with a first clown whose makeup became corpsepaint after the first bull comically gored it. Anyhoo, there’s not much country music on this list so the inclusion of these North Carolina field recordings captured by Jenks Miller (as those fields, and their accompanying fauna/insects, exist and rattle within Jenks Miller’s psyche) might indeed be my throwing a bone to all the cowpokes. But it’s not just a bone. Setting aside how well this, or any other Horseback album, did on the Clear Channel country radio charts of the time (I assume pretty well), the bone of Piedmont Apocrypha is not the bone of any animal I’ve ever seen. It’s the bone of something old—heavy but with an incongruously delicate hoof indention—that still exists, maybe with a limp or maybe with a new bone, which might call you out by name from the woods, from a shaded part where the eye can’t quite make out what it's seeing, even while the sun is shining, even as the shadows shift not with the regular tracking of the sun but as if to fit the contours of the space where the calling of your name—now strange to your ears—hails from. It’s probably fine. The question/warning implied by “Are You Ready For The Country?” might have been rhetorical.  Regardless, Piedmont Apocrypha is a rootin’ tootin’, blackened pastoral grazing of the astral plane; proof of something that ain’t a sight to see. Let the jury note that you can’t spell Yahweh w/o yee-haw. 

PS. While I really can’t add any more albums to 2014 as it’s taking up way too much space as it is (who knew that 2014 was such a boffo year for music? Certainly, at the time at least, not me.) but I’ll be mad at myself if I fail to mention an equally universe-attuned, cicada-driven slab of folk music which was released just two days after Piedmont Apocrypha. That album is Dragging an Ox Through Water - Panic Sentry (Eggy / Mississippi Records / Party Damage), which I recommend for anyone who’s ever had their heart broken by either the cold coming through the glass panes of white-chipped-paint kitchen window or by a haunted gas stove (possessed by either a professor of poetry from the local university, who died from drink in ‘55, or by the ghost of one of those language deprived Nells who run amok in the forests of the Pacific Northwest during the alt-strip clubs’ offseasons). While every bit of it is meant as a compliment, I’m not going to make anybody happy by comparing Brian Mumford’s Dragging an Ox Through Water to a combo of a lonesome ‘n’ high Mickey Newbury, John Fahey*, a refrigerator unit with faulty wiring, and an orchestra tuning up, but I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to win. 

*Rarely listening to acoustic guitars by choice, I have no other point of comparison. Feel free to substitute Fahey comparison with a more accurate strummer if u got one. 

May

Museum Mouth - Alex I Am Nothing (Self Aware Records) As discomfittingly confessional as it is spilling over with the kind of kicks you can traditionally only find within the fogged up windows of a car still idling in the mall parking lot, long after the last cineplex showing of *insert preferred title of alternativenationsploitation flick HERE* has ended. Emotionally disarrayed hookiness = Pop-punk Xiu Xiu = a Xiu Xiu I wanna listen to. No shade on Xiu Xiu. I just prefer my overwroughtness within the context of a rocking theoretical soundtrack to a theoretical sequel to Angus. 

Instinct of Survival - Call of the Blue Distance (Colturschock / Agipunk) German crusties eschew both the stadium, the stench (relatively speaking), and the core in order to take Amebix’s love of Killing Joke as far as a punk can go without being pastiche or literally becoming Jaz Coleman Youth. With the heft of their crust-magic a given, and with some Hellhammer grunts thrown in for taste, the result is one of the most aggressive and gloriously bossy post-punk albums out there. 

June

Lana Del Rey - Ultraviolence (Polydor) I still think it’s got no more depth than anything that’s more shadow of a thing than a thing itself, but I’m coming around on her. I’m at least sold on Del Rey’s listenability and her importance. If not as a prophetess (didn’t take a genius to see which way the wind was blowing), then at least as a totemic, embodying, force. I will no longer deny that there are itches in this world that only a Lana Del Rey can exactly scratch. Not for a full fifty minutes (I don’t get that itchy) but definitely for the time it takes to smoke 3-5 cigarettes in rapid succession. 

But, listen, if I’m going to cosign this fantasia, I don’t want to ever hear any of you fuckers who love this say that “there is no great right wing art,” ok? Because, baby, Lana Del Rey would give the remaining muscles in her face to go back in time to entertain the troops with Bob Hope. She’d have killed Bobby Kennedy herself, for a song or if you asked her to. This album is a Bircher pamphlet as rolling paper. It’s Ollie North and Fawn Hall reenacting the video for “Wicked Games.” It’s the Reagan White House, but only the wing reserved for Nancy Reagan going down (complimentary) on Frank Sinatra (complimentary). It’s not the current regime’s kind of kitsch, because Del Rey, to her credit, doesn’t dig the boring kind of tacky. But we’re using drones as 4th of July fireworks these days and you can bet that reality will be used by Del Rey as a metaphor sooner than later, and done so uncritically. Ultraviolence is the sound of Eve Babitz beating Joan Didion to death with a hot pink tire iron, only for the victor to be run over by one the cast members of Vanderpump Rules (probably Jax). Anybody who claims otherwise is living in an oceanspray dreamland of their own accepting. If Amanda Milius doesn’t own multiple copies of Ultraviolence, I’ll eat my hat.

All that aside, pretty fun. 

August

Lenguas Largas - Come On In (Recess Records) Without writing an entire essay for each entry, I’ll simply point out that critical and popular consensus are complete bullshit. It's imperative that we be as wild and free as the Summer wind, and so Languas Largas are. If you weren’t a regular reader of Razorcake, or a Fest attendee, it’s unlikely you’d have heard of this Tucson psych-punk(ish) outfit, despite the fact that this album of border-elevator freakouts—clocking in at just two tracks short of a 13th Floor—blows 99.99999999999999% of the other bands of its ilk/time out of the water.

September

Witch Mountain - Mobile of Angels (Profound Lore) I’ve never understood doom bands who (obviously) love Black Sabbath but then skimp on the vocals. With the exception of Yob (whose occasional forays into brontosaurus barking get by on sheer spiritual perseverance), I really don’t get cookie monster vocals attached to seismic wave riffs. Neither, it appears, do Witch Mountain, seeing as, for two albums at least, they utilized—to wondrous effect—a singer who wooed and wailed like Linda Ronstadt coming down from the mountain. A descending Ronstadt, in this particular case, carrying tablets which biblically categorized what an asshole the subject of this jeremiadic song-cycle is. Or must have been to deserve such righteous fury. 

October

Consumer Electronics - Estuary English (Dirter Promotions) Imagine a Sleaford Mods with a case of the Mondays. Philip Best has been doing his noisenik transgressor thing for so long (since 1982!) that culture-at-large eventually caught up with his early edge-lord provocations, and then nightmarishly surpassed ‘em, with the result being that now he’s one of our sane ones. (I almost wrote “one of the good guys,” but let’s not get carried away. I doubt being thought of as virtuous by people like me is high up on Best’s priorities anyway…)

Future - Monster (Freebandz) Atlanta synthezoid and blurry visionary goes Kraftwork crazy, flips the script by pretending to be flesh and blood. He makes like all the best androids and cries. Outside of “Codeine Crazy” (Future’s automatic-piano-ballad which reminds me mostly of the Mott The Hoople* album closer, “I Wish I Was Your Mother”) and the track where Future proves Vampire Weekend wrong about commas, nothing on here is as epic as Pluto’s “You Deserve It.” But, if we’re talking generational anthems, there wasn’t anything as epic as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on In Utero either, and we don’t begrudge that generational sin eater his right to come-down. 

Anyway, Pluto came out in 2012, when the VICE employees who lived by it were barely twenty-four, still bright-eyed and full of hope/other stuff. By 2014, Future’s sluggish night of the soul was just what they needed; a time for reflection. I’m not saying that Future is responsible for VICE employees realizing that what they really deserved was a union, I’m just saying that the rapper soon made “Just Like Bruddas,” a song which was, among other stuff, about solidarity. 

*Jeff Weiss argues that Future is our Dylan. I’ll buy that, but only because the rapper is too successful to be our Ian Hunter.

November

Azealia Banks - Broke With Expensive Taste (Prospect Park / Caroline) I drew the line at some brilliant music made by some terrible people in the Russian/Ukranian black metal scenes, but there’s only so far that we can pretend that nice people have the monopoly on that good good art. Fans of Kanye West could make a reasonable comparison in terms of the genius/asshole dichotomy but, as a rockist, I’m putting Banks in with Ben Weasel and/or Jimmy Page. Pick your poison, but let’s not deny either the toxicity or how well it goes down in the moment. 

Mitski - Bury Me At Makeout Creek (Dead Oceans) The Mitski discourse has been so endless, and endlessly pointless, that it’s easy to forget that it all started here; with an album of dark basslines so tuff and driving that they verge on Am-Rep, singing as Americana-operatic and blue as any wild yonder, and songs so well constructed in concrete that you could live in ‘em (and thousands of online oversharers did just that). 

Maurice Louca - Benhayyi Al-Baghbaghan (Salute the Parrot) (Nawa Recordings) “There’s a moment, about halfway through Salute the Parrot, where you realize the record isn’t beginnings or endings; Louca is interested in weather; pressure systems, currents, ecstatic drifts. Maurice Louca is coaxing a murmuration: reeds, synths, and percussion folding into each other until you can’t tell what’s leading and what’s following. Or maybe you clock it even earlier, when the thing doesn’t start. It leaks into the room like a just-lit Nag Champa, like somebody cracked a window and all the Cairo air, dust, radio static, and ghosts just wandered in and refused to leave. If you came looking for songs that behave: verse, chorus, polite applause! you’re in the wrong apartment. Louca’s building a living organism: reeds coughing, synths twitching, rhythms that feel hand-played and half-remembered, like a procession that forgot where it was going but kept dancing anyway. The tracks swirl, eddy around each other, bleeding at the edges, dissolving the idea that anything needs a dignified exit. The horns seep. The grooves hover, wobble, threaten to dissolve, then cohere again. You start hearing fractal patterns like an off-axis kaleidoscope; where little flourishes dervish around some stark center. It’s hypnotic without ever going soft. Like the floor might tilt if you get too comfortable. And there’s humor here, a sideways grin in the way a groove almost becomes danceable before slipping back into vapor. Dummies used to slap the “world” genre designation on records like this. Salute the Parrot isn’t world music, it’s the atmosphere of a world music. That’s right, blah blah blah. Somewhere in the imaginary critic’s collapsing FM tower, you’d say Louca has made a prog record for people who don’t trust virtuosity, a jazz record for people suspicious of solos (you can hear Sun Ra’s cosmic clutter, Pharoah Sanders’ ceremonial patience, even the twitchy refusal-to-sit-still of The Pop Group), a psych record that refuses the cheap trick of transcendence.” - Zohra Atash, Azar Swan, NYC

TV on the Radio - Seeds (Harvest) Once again, maybe not the chosen artists’ “best” album, and so what; it’s not like these artists in particular have any duds. Feel free to switch this out with Return to Cookie Mountain if the demands of history are too much for you. But Seeds is TV on the Radio’s most immediate album and I’m a happy idiot for it. As Supremes/symphony as it is Gloria Jones-era Soft Cell or late-period Roxy, the heady grief is channeled through hope-against-hope-ism. The supposed acceptance of the second half doesn’t feel like acceptance at all, or even close to it. 

December

Trash Kit - Confidence (Upset the Rhythm) Just saw some music site did a Top Guitarists of the 21st Century and they included half the americana meanderers in the biz, but not Ray Aggs. While some of us are out here trying to justify the continued existence of rock and roll criticism, we’re being undercut by philistines and Foxygen fans. Or maybe Fleet Foxes fans. I get them confused, as tends to happen when the indiesphere is largely a plate of mush. Not Aggs tho; every string the UK guitarist manipulates rings out both singularly askew and embracingly electric. Pair Aggs with an Electrelane-tte so they can help twist pop rock into something as mysterious as the Slits in Sun Studio, and you’d almost think a new world—free from oppression, patriarchy, and the hierarchy of lists—is possible. Maybe not the last one. A critic’s got to eat. 

D’Angelo and the Vanguard - Black Messiah (RCA) D’Angelo sitting on the foot of the stage, asking “you ever feel like you’ve been cheated.” But, instead of gobs of spit being hurled at him, he’s talking about panties, and the punk he’s had it with is America. Regardless how you spin it, the result is There’s a Metal Box Going On. Or maybe the result is Sign o’ the Poptones. Still workshopping those analogies. No matter how you metaphor it; shit rules. Gorgeous ballads of Dorothy Parker, a drum sound that thumps cozily on par with the warmest drum sounds recorded by human design. Sublime ballads of all the other men and women who are stars. Layers of rising voices; the stars of gospel youth choir, all grown up and exhibiting competitive streaks that’d be unseemly in church if the results weren’t so seemly. And guitar/bass tones so subtly fuzzed they practically exfoliate. 

People can tell themselves that the album is hopeful, but it still sounds like it was recorded in purgatory with all the unbaptized babies, and all the babies who still might go either way. 

January

Jazmine Sullivan - Reality Show (RCA Records) Why this contemporary R&B album above so many others? Because, besides the ace tunes, Sullivan’s voice is almost singular in that it’s at ease at both raspy pleading and crystalline come-hither. More importantly to my admittedly particular needs, Sullivan’s tool never sounds facilely classic, self-effacingly girlish, auto-futurized, stoned, or English. I understand that all of those (in more generous framing) are positives to most, and are accordingly popular, but in the same way that I prefer AC/DC to the Beatles, I want my R&B more Blige than Blonde, I prefer the directness of Ronnie Spector over Ronsen retro-go-go and, with all due respect to the producers of modernist ghost trails, I prefer my showbiz with enough grit to compete with the reality it purports to be a salve for. 

G.L.O.S.S. - demo (self-released / Total Negativity / Nervous Nelly / Sabotage) Entire neighborhoods in Silverlake were cancelled for implying that this top notch street punk band got coverage in the music press due to the members being trans. Which is funny because A. it’s true and B. it’s true only because music writers were following the cues of punx who knew hot shit ruff-neck hardcore when they heard it. And those same writers woulda loved G.L.O.S.S. on the band’s merits if writers had better taste in punk. If Pitchfork had been a bit more effusive in its praise for Agent Orange (whose “Blood Stains” is pretty much interpolated here on “Lined Lips and Spiked Bats”) or Gang Green, the shoegaze edgelords wouldn’t have had a shoe to stand on. Anyway, these gals from the future came, ruled, and imploded. A few years later, after the left lost the culture wars, the rightwingers would add insult to injury by foisting upon us all a band called Conservative Military Image, a darker shade of slash-fiction mascara entirely (who, compared to G.L.O.S.S., sound like the fucking Knack).   

February

Songhoy Blues - Music In Exile (Transgressive) With the situation in Mali once again utterly fucked, let's raise a glass to Songhoy Blues, the perpetually kicked-around Bamako rockers who—starting with this Nick Zinner produced, rough and ready cruiser—have consistently made great rock records under the most absurd circumstances imaginable. On Music In Exile, their (infuriatingly still aptly titled) debut, the band tears through originals like they were Sun Studio standards, and altogether dance this not-of-their-making mess around, almost as if the sound was the next best thing to a home. Accordingly, it's the band's prerogative to keep shit tight and clean, or jump on the furniture, as they see fit.

March

Courtney Barnett - sometimes i sit and think, and sometimes i just sit (Milk! / Mom + Pop) Despite the Courtney Barnett and Vince Staples albums of this year having diametrically opposed views on whether one should or shouldn’t jump off the roof, the two undercover poptimists have more than a few things in common; hyper-attention to the minutia of their surroundings, a Ramones-esque gift for a bubblegum hook, a disinclination to wear red, and a contempt for dummies that they do a little–but not too much—to hide. And if both affect world weariness bordering on nihilism, the bright life which both infuse into their art’s expression of such makes it pretty hard to believe that either of them find the world as tiresome as they claim. 

April

Terrible Feelings - Tremors (Deranged Records / Sabotage Records) Incredibly catchy, incredibly earnest, expertly played and sung, weirdly-if-undeniably-moving punkish-esque rock music. Like a stadium version of Dead Moon (complimentary). At first, when I heard Terrible Feelings around 2012, it weirded me out that punks were super into a band with distinctly hard rock vocals (Manuella Iwansson could have fronted Penetration, sure, but she also would have had her pick of the litter in the hairspray-rockin’ ‘80s), but then I decided it was awesome. Might have been neat if the ever fickle punx had gone further down that road, but I guess the allure of d-beat/death rock was too strong to resist. 

Dwight Yoakam - Second Hand Heart (Warner Brothers) Yeah, sorry, no Beck on this one, but no Kid Rock either. So, all things being equal, the songs on this follow up 2013’s Two Pears are some of Yoakam’s heftiest and niftiest; beachy, boyish, and chock full of big pink house strumming. In a time when so much guitar music was insta-nostalgic, Highlife-under-moonlight, nü Boss-hoss horseshit, Yoakam rocks her like a doctor to such a superior, fresh ‘n easy-does-it degree that, if I were Beach Slang, Menzingers, et al. about to enter the studio, I’d have just called in sick. 

Beauty Pill - Describes Things As They Are (Findings) Because it’s Chad Clark’s party—he of Smart Went Crazy, and the mixing/mastering/producing of countless albums either put out by Dischord Records or sounding like they could have—it’s tempting in a cute way to call Beauty Pill a “post-hardcore” band. Which could be argued, sort of, when the collective CVs of all involved are counted alongside the D.C. DIY obstinance of Clark’s vision(s). Still, one must be real. Post-hardcore should be so lucky. So, failing that pigeonhole, it’s equally tempting—when attempting to describe the music on Describes Things As They Are as it is—to copy and paste passages from Stereolab’s Wikipedia page. This, while lazy, bad, and insufficient to our needs, would still almost work. The wry and swaying, probing and strange, songs on this double album do indeed contain plenty of post-rock, indie-rock, lounge, art-pop, French-pop, indie-pop, indietronica, kraut-pop, and all the mixes and matches of those descriptors that a well curated Scrabble bag might allow for. But you know what? Fuck this. None of us are getting younger and Chad Clark’s brilliance for moods isn’t a blank check for equivocation. Describes Things As They Are is post-hardcore, because in a game of signifiers, affiliations matter. You can even call it “community” if you’re a wuss. Regardless, this is the Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops as post-hardcore; once-young D.C. townie-punks counting their tinsel in the rain, losing love and familiarity like they got holes in their pockets. Hardcore music is behind them. Life’s otherwise hardcore is closer than it appears.

May

Islam Chipsy & EEK - Kahraba (Nashazphone) EEK consists of two Islams (Chipsy and Ta’ta), two drummers (the aforementioned Ta’ta and Khaled Maando), and one synthesizer/Chipsy (the aforementioned Islam Chipsy, who appropriately leads this Chippendale-ian trio of lightning bolts). I cutely use the (non-Agean) Rhode Island’s Lightning Bolt as a touchstone only as part of the state dept. mandated requirement to compare all international acts to at least one local concern, lest anyone labor under the belief that any artists beyond our borders might be tapping into any universal electronics-noise-scape through their own traditions and/or genius (or worse, putting our various Fort Thunders to shame). I also use it to give the reader at least the most general idea of why their money might be well spent buying this dabke-tronic & dubstomping clatterpiece of Downtown Cairo fine-ass-ery. To be clear, it’s unlikely that Chipsy Islam has listened to too much Providence noise-rock (though who knows), or even Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Hoedown.” So forgive my provincialism. That said, if any of those comparisons help convince you to let this deadhead drum ‘n’ bass synth-goliath into your life (and I hope they do because, trust me, your life needs this), you are very welcome. 

Ceremony - The L-Shaped Man (Matador) Ceremony’s first, second, or third best album; depending on how one feels about hardcore, new wave, the truth etc. My idiot friends and peers called this Joy Division, just because it sounds like Joy Division. Besides being wholesale late-era Blitz erasure, such analysis is the kind of tree-over-forest pedantry typical of my profession. Setting aside the fact that the Summertime ‘06 was the Joy Division album of 2015 (and Vince Staples doesn’t strike me as someone who enjoys sharing a pedestal), The L-Shaped Man is obviously an Elastica record. If it’s not specifically* Elastica’s first album then L-Shaped Man is what we all wanted The Menace to sound like. And if not specifically that, well, still; these swoony earworms and basslines—that don’t so much drive as swing from still ring to still ring—are what I assume it sounded like when Justine Frischmann and the dude from Suede made out and/or broke up. 

*tbc the entirely delightful middle track, “The Pattern,” is the platonic ideal of an Elastica-doing-Wire song.  

Muerte - LP (Cintas Pepe / SPHC / Cabeza de Vaca Records) Mexican punx supergroup make a gang-vocaled, near-death-rock album so fatalistic and burly it puts both the “kill” and “bulldozer” in Killdozer (in this metaphor, both Muerte and Killdozer are a deathrock bands). 

Elysia Crampton Chuquimia - American Drift (Blueberry) Good lord do I love innovation and experimentation that sounds like neither. Gimme a big cotton candy tongue and walls of Disintegration Loopiness, or don’t give me much at all. I didn’t know that I also love it when innovation sounds like a hyperreal, half-erased mixtape for an extended Summertime-into-Fall day—complete with a visit to the secret squeezebox graveyard—but I do now! My most favorite parts of American Drift’s overall vibeology are when it sounds like hippos tap dancing on a sandy boardwalk at magic hour. But the interspacialized dune buggies speeding by, leaving snippets of Hot 97 radio chatter in the wind, are nice too. I have no doubt that listening to the Americas-ana works of Chuquimia Crampton (as well as her brother’s) is more enriching (or edifying, fun, whatever) if you know what’s being referenced, pulled from, utilized, mourned; basically if one generally knows what’s going on. That said, having even the most remote sense of gravity, and/or up and down, isn’t necessary to take the ride. 

Lydia Lunch Retrovirus - Urge To Kill (Widowspeak Productions) Lunch’s pin-to-wall, Amphetamined Reptilian combo featured Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers), Tim Dahl (Child Abuse), and Bob Bert (Pussy Galore, Knoxville Girls, Chrome Cranks, all the other band). As with the drummer’s swell Chrome Cranks album from just a few years prior, I’d settle for it being good, but jokes on me for setting the bar so low. Yes, considering that these are not people historically inclined towards long-term lucidity or longevity in general, it’d be enough just for a Lydia Lunch skronk-rock band to so loudly exist. That Urge To Kill not only exists, but also wipes the floor with any blues-noise combo that’d presume to compete with it, is enough to make one believe in miracles in a way that’d make Lunch spit. Which, as her band heaves with the vigour of  venom of Sonic Adults, Lunch does. She also howls, moans, rants, belts out, proselytizes, poeticises, and altogether shakes what the good goddess gave her, what the world made her, what no son of a bitch (or otherwise bitch either), could ever hope to take away from her. 

June

Vince Staples - Summertime ‘06 (ARTium, Blacksmith, Def Jam) Considering the album art’s homage to Unknown Pleasures, combined with the amount of consternation the man has devoted to his popularity amongst the sort of people who make lists like this, it’d frankly be disrespectful to not include this goth hop (sorry, Vince. sorry, everybody) masterpiece. 

September

Alif - Aynama-Rtama (Nawa Recordings) I used to play the sole album by this Arab world supergroup* at the bar I worked at. Customers enjoyed it, and it was neat-o to hear how their West Village-American ears** translated the sounds. Comparisons ranged from Mars Volta to Radiohead (the comparison was not yet a slur) to Joni Mitchell to Pink Floyd. By the time that “Al-Khutba Al-Akhira (The Last Declamation),” the album’s centerpiece which consists of a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish set to a loping and clattering march underneath cascading laser-falls of synth/electronics, the attempts at comparison usually dropped. I’m loath to make the Radiohead comparison myself, but if I did so in order to shift some units, the David Berman quote—about how Radiohead was the biggest band to be about nothing—would have to be the qualifier. As in: imagine Radiohead (if you must), but if they were good, and about something. 

*Made up of Khyam Allami (Oud), Tamer Abu Ghazaleh (Vocals/Buzuq), Bashar Farran (Bass), Maurice Louca (Keys/Electronics) and Khaled Yassine (Drums/Percussion), and recorded at the singular Tunefort Studios in Beirut. 

**fwiw we did have some Middle Eastern/Persian/South Asian/West Village-American regulars, but they mostly wanted to hear heavy metal. 

October

Richard Papiercuts - “IF” (ever/never records) Those loveable moptops known as Roxy Musique, playing the Cavern Club in 2057, tearing through covers versions of “Young Savage” and “Fat Mama Kick” for two sets a night. Winking at the coatcheck girls, the lads occasionally pay lipservice to the standards requesting squares, but only by teasing out an interpolation of the opening riff to L7’s “Shove,” and doing so real lithogenic like; over and over, till the coatcheck girls rush the stage, wearing nothing but clothes, Clove cigarettes, and saxophones. Then the whole gang breaks out Richard Papiercuts’ international smash (top of the pops on the continent at least), the blue moon cruiser know as “Peanut Butter Is Back!!!” And the crowd completely loses their minds. 

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