In my humble opinion, of course, cognizant of the fact that there was a lot of worthwhile music I will likely never hear, and in no particular order:
CAR SEAT HEADREST – “TEENS OF DENIAL” From Paul Westerberg thru Bob Mould, Kurt Cobain, Steve Malkmus, Adam Savage, and Dylan Baldi, I’ve always had a soft spot for sensitive young punks who yoke their teenage angst to tuneful guitar noise. Add CSH’s Will Toledo to the lineage. This also might be the best record about drugs since another sensitive young punk with an ear for guitar noise released something called “Tonight’s the Night.”
LAURIE ANDERSON: “HEART OF A DOG” In this mostly spoken-word recording, the performance art pioneer mourns a beloved pet, a not-so-beloved mother, and the sense of normality that existed prior to the 9/11 attacks. Near the end, she realizes that the most important aspect of the stories we tell are the parts we omit. And, then, the glaring omission that has haunted this meditation on magic and loss is finally acknowledged, still only obliquely but to devastating effect.
PARQUET COURTS: “WIDE AWAAAAAKE!” I could have gone with either of their other two LP’s, but chose this, their third, by which time they had achieved an identity strong enough that I no longer listened to them thru their influences. Even with a big name producer on board, there’s no mistaking them from the very first chords. Lyrically, their strength had always been their ability to make the philosophical personal. But with times being what they are, that may now be an indulgence. So they fix their gaze outwards, its targets highly specific. When they end their collectivist manifesto with “And fuck Tom Brady!”, I’m pumping my fist right along with them. But moments later, on one called “Before the Water Gets Too High”, they’re looking me right in the eye as they sing “Is it someone else’s job until the rich are refugees?”
RUN THE JEWELS: “RTJ3” Recorded during the 2016 US election, in which Killer Mike stumped hard for Bernie Sanders, it seemed a given that this record would be fueled by political rage no matter the outcome of the election. So it was a surprise when, at first, this record seemed to pick up where its predecessors left off. But that was just a feint: About half way thru the beats turn darker, the lyrics more pointed, and by the end Mike is inciting a full-on slave rebellion. El-P is no slouch, but as a rapper he can’t compete with Mike’s fervour and articulation, so he concedes to the latter most of the musically climactic moments, which is really a reflection of perhaps their most potent political message: Their friendship. I just wish the obligatory sex jams weren’t quite so obligatory. Guys, didn’t you notice who was marching the day after the inauguration?
DANNY BROWN: “ATROCITY EXHIBITION” The album’s title alludes to Joy Division, the opening track to Nine Inch Nails and his new label is Warp. That should have served as a warning to anyone drawn by the party jams on his previous record: None of that here. This is progressive rap with the emphasis on the “progressive”. He also increasingly defaults to the high-pitched yelp that denotes Mr. Hyde to his Dr. Jeckyl, or Two Face to his Harvey Dent. For his own sake, I hope that’s just an artistic decision.
MOUNT EERIE: “A CROW LOOKED AT ME” On the first track, a man opens the mail to find a gift, a backpack, his wife who has died of cancer just days earlier had ordered for their child. He naturally collapses to the ground and wails. The story is a true one, and the man in the song is Phil Elverum, who is singing it. I’d rationalized my initial resistance to this record by telling myself that a person’s private grief is not something to be made into public entertainment. And at times Elverum even seems to agree, singing “(Death’s) not for singing about / It’s not for making into art.” But here he is, doing it anyway. And I eventually realized that, having come too close for comfort to being in the singer’s shoes, I was just being a coward. Elverum never even tries to resolve the conundrum presented in that couplet. He probably had no more choice in the matter than he did about wailing at the sight of that backpack.
MARGARET GLASPY: “EMOTIONS AND MATH” With PJ Harvey’s inconsistent recent output, it’s nice to know there are other hyper-literate female singer-songwriters out there who know their way around an electric guitar. St. Vincent is one, and Margaret Glaspy is another. She’s rather more earthbound than the aforementioned. Her Telecaster growls out lines that are basic country/blues riffs, but played just a bit off-kilter, and her lyrics are pretty much all about relationships, but always come from a particular angle. Over the first three tracks she starts out embarrassed for pining over an absent lover. Then, after warning someone to keep his unwanted advice to himself, she flips the tables and tells a (presumably different) lover to stop his sentimental whining, man up, and just do the one thing he’s good for.
SOLANGE: “A SEAT AT THE TABLE” I know the decade belonged to her big sis, but this one really stuck with me. Perhaps it was the demonstration that it’s still possible to create startling and forward-looking R&B-based music with live instruments, or how the spoken-word interludes don’t just function as exegesis but also pace the music and allow it to cohere; or how her voice exuded soul without flash or histrionics. But maybe, when you get right down to it, she’s all about the bass.
THAO & THE GET DOWN STAY DOWN: “A MAN ALIVE” This was produced by Merril Garbus (AKA tUnE-yArDs) which provides a useful point of reference; both artists share the same childlike primitivism and playful rhythmic complexity. But the darkness at the heart of this record is literally Thao’s own, with the songs directed at the father who vanished from her life when she was a child and reappeared sporadically and unexpectedly thereafter. I don’t think you have to be a psychiatrist to be a bit alarmed by lyrics like “I don’t want it/Carve it on out of me/I got an endless love/No one can starve.”
MATANA ROBERTS: “COIN COIN, Chapters 1-4” The avant-garde jazz saxophonist/composer/ multimedia artist has so far released four installments in a projected twelve part series documenting her ancestral history thru intensely varied musical genres and spoken word passages. Already essential, if she can keep the quality up this stands to be one of the century’s signal artistic achievements, if you’ll excuse the hyperbole.
FLYING LOTUS: “COSMOGRAMMA” – Electronic music has produced many artists able to create interesting and evocative soundscapes. But Steven Ellison’s music stands out from the crowd for its sense of structure, harmonic movement, and jazz-like spontaneity (the latter not that surprising from a member of the Coltrane family.) His outright weirdness came more to the fore after this, his breakout LP, but is also already here in nascent form.
BIG THIEF: “CAPACITY” Much as I love this album, for the longest time I could remember little of it beyond the line “Woo, baby, take me.” That’s not meant as a criticism. Its barely-there, edge-of-sleep quality is one of its most attractive qualities, reflecting how Adrianne Lenker’s lyrics describe emotionally laden, often traumatic, events in language that is allusive and fragmentary, as if she is attempting capture them at the very moment they are fading from memory.
THE KNIFE: “SHAKING THE HABITUAL” The seven year recording hiatus (Karin Dreijer’s solo turn as Fever Ray notwithstanding) that separated this from the equally epochal “Silent Shout” was largely devoted to visually arresting theatrical projects, including an opera about Charles Darwin. Which might explain why “Shaking the Habitual” seems to be straining at the limits of what a music recording can be. The tracks are not only long, but full of alien sound and rhythmic effects that threaten to obliterate the structure of the songs altogether. The effect is as thrilling as it is disorienting.
KENDRICK LAMAR: “TO PIMP A BUTTERFLY” No getting away from this one, but it’s worth remembering what a game-changer is seemed to be at the time of its release. Instead, with its backing tracks from a live core band that barely had to change its approach when it decided to make a straight up jazz record, to the still-astonishing agility of the rapping, to lyrics that acutely acknowledge the racial reality of the artist’s time and place as well as how his material success does and, crucially, does not change his relation to that reality, TPAB remains a singular and anomalous accomplishment that has spawned few if any imitators, never mind progeny.
DEATH GRIPS: “THE MONEY STORE” The band often evokes bemused questions regarding exactly what provokes the anger that seethes from their abrasive, chaotic tracks. But that presumes anger to be an emotion which is less an entitlement than any other. A lot of thought and craft went into creating all that abrasive chaos. I can only assume that they have their reasons.
THE MAGNETIC FIELDS: “50 SONG MEMOIR” The obvious precedent is the 1999 classic “69 Love Songs”, and if Stephin Merrit is now giving less value for the dollar (Two more discs but 19 fewer songs) he can be excused on conceptual grounds: Each disc represents a decade and each song a year of his life. If he has come across as a bit arch at times in the past, this record suggests that (assuming he’s being straight with us this time) there was actually more truth to songs like “Papa Was A Rodeo” than seemed plausible.
JAMILA WOODS: “LEGACY! LEGACY” Reviewed here.
FATHER JOHN MISTY: “I LOVE YOU, HONEYBEAR” Who would have thought that, among the earnest bearded young men of the Fleet Foxes, there lurked this dissolute goofball? Funniest record I heard this decade.
TITUS ANDRONICUS: “THE MONITOR” This could have – should have – been a depressing, pretentious slog: In the aftermath of a breakup, Patrick Stickles analogizes his personal despair to that of his country during the Civil War in songs that stretch to the 14 minute mark, interspersed with dramatic readings of the writings of Walt Whitman, Jefferson Davis, William Lloyd Garrison, and Abraham Lincoln. So attribute the fact that it is, instead, moving and thrilling to the timeless power of loud, fast guitars and vocals shouted to the point of hoarseness. Oh, and to the fact that Stickles’s idol is Bruce Springsteen.
MARC RIBOT TRIO: “LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD” Though Albert Ayler is not nearly as pervasive an influence as Bird, Miles or Trane on the current state of jazz, the fact remains that without him the music would now sound very different than it does. Perhaps it is not surprising that Ribot, like Ayler an eclectic with questionable legit jazz cred, would produce a rare overt acknowledgements of this debt, with one of Ayler’s former sidemen along to help out.
APHEX TWIN: “SYRO” When the granddaddy of IDM suddenly reappeared with this record, it was surprising enough. But who expected him to still be so on top of his game? Not quite as groundbreaking as his earlier work, he still sounds like no one else, and the new element he introduces this time is variable temperament which, in non-technical terms, means he’s using his own set of notes that no one else has.
SLEATER-KINNEY: “NO CITIES TO LOVE” I don’t know if anyone really expected the “indefinite hiatus” they announced in 2005 to be permanent. The chief impediment to a reunion seemed to be Carrie Brownstein’s wholly unforeseeable career as a TV comedian. But it was a relief that when the best rock band of the past 25 years got back together all the essential ingredients were still there, including the telepathic vocal and guitar interplay between Brownstein and Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss’s inimitably propulsive drumming. What was new was a more acute and terse approach to songwriting.
TAME IMPALA: “LONERISM” It was quite a trick, making a record that sounds like 1969 and 2012 at the same time.
TUNE-YARDS: “WHOKILL” Much of the charm of her earlier records lay in their playful, DIY-on-the-cheap quality, and it was reasonable to worry this would be lost in the move to a bigger label and a bigger budget. But, in the end, this just gave her a much bigger box of toys to play with. Listening to this on headphones is particularly fun, with blasts of sound coming at you unexpectedly from all directions. So much fun, in fact, that it’s easy to miss the serious messages often contained in the lyrics.
VAMPIRE WEEKEND: “MODERN VAMPIRES IN THE CITY” After two very fine, Afropop inflected LP’s, this represented a risky move to more purely song-oriented material, though Rostam Batmanglij’s atmospherics and sound treatments remained a crucial part of the mix. Ezra Koenig, meanwhile, fearlessly tackled the big issues (God, death, the intrusion of history into our daily lives) from the particular viewpoint of a secularized Jew relieved of the burdens but also denied the comforts of both faith and reflexive skepticism. And in “Hannah Hunt” he may have written his generation’s most beautiful love song.
VIJAY IYER: “ACCELERANDO” Like most of the leading jazz musicians of his generation, Iyer demonstrates a refreshing catholicism in terms of his style and taste. His performances have incorporated electronics, extended classical forms, east Asian influences , and other material outside of the jazz canon. At first glance, this trio outing might appear to be a retreat to a more traditionalist approach, but a look through the composer credits will soon dispel that. Alongside a brace of originals, there are covers of tunes by Michael Jackson, the 70’s funk-disco group Heatwave and even the aforementioned Flying Lotus. The selections by fellow jazz composers, meanwhile, eschew the tried and true. Herbie Nichols is still an underappreciated figure of the bop era, and not many people are playing Henry Treadgill’s pieces other than the man himself. Even the Duke Ellington closer is an obscurity.
JAMIE XX: “IN COLOUR” It’s easy to overlook Jamie XX’s pervasive influence, both as a member of The XX and as a producer/remixer, because of how little he has released under his own name. This is club music, ostensibly, but I’m no clubber. This grabs me with its atmosphere, its melodies lurking just below the surface, and its constant shifts in tone and style. And, sure, its groove. We non-clubbers can groove sitting still, you know.
COURTNEY BARNETT: “SOMETIMES I SIT AND THINK, AND SOMETIMES I JUST SIT” Critic Greg Tate called this hip-hop, and he may have been on to something. Though the back up is guitar-based indie rock played straight, she rides over it with a verbal agility and ingenuity, not to mention just a shitload of words, that is rare in any other genre. Then there’s also the way she draws social observations from personal experience. So, yeah, one of the hip-hop records of the decade.
FIONA APPLE: “THE IDLER WHEEL IS WISER THAN THE DRIVER OF THE SCREW AND WHIPPING CORDS WILL SERVE YOU MORE THAN ROPES WILL EVER DO” I don’t know if this is what happened, but it’s easy to imagine that after all the futzing about with the arrangements that delayed the release of her previous LP (seven years earlier), she decided to go with just her piano, abetted by the occasional unobstrusive percussion and bass from her producer, to accompany her voice, the latter with the rawness of a first take. Then, another seven year silence.
JAMES MCMURTY: “COMPLICATED GAME” The son of a major novelist, McMurtry has a writer’s eye for the telling detail. He also has a blue collar liberal sensibility similar to that of Bruce Springsteen, but tends to narrow down to the specific rather than aiming for the grand statement, one consequence of which is that his politics are more overt. He’s also particularly astute on the topic of the complications of middle-aged sex.
NONAME: “ROOM 25” Rap has always come primarily from a first person perspective, but it’s only recently that a confessional strain has become prominent in the music. Like so much else, we can trace this back to Kanye, but his form of introspection typically descends into self-flagellation when it is not overwhelmed by his egotism. Noname can also be pretty hard on herself, but its certainly easier to empathize with the travails of someone whose fame, such as it is, still means she has to worry about making the rent. Her conversational, almost mumbled, flow helps draw you in, and the jazzy, soulful backing tracks complement it perfectly.
ARCA I won’t pretend to be immersed sufficiently in the genre to know if this is a general trend, but based not only on this record but on the recent output of Aphex Twin, Onheohtrix Point Never, and Andy Stott I have noticed an increasing tendency among electronic musicians to incorporate the human voice. This does not by itself turn their soundscapes into songs, per se. But it has the effect similar to the inclusion of human figures in a landscape painting: It provides a point of focus and suggests a narrative and temporal structural context for the atmospherics and sound effects. My favourites of the latter are on the appropriately titled “Whip.”
GRIMES: “ART ANGELS” It took me a while to warm up to this record. Reports of her having dumped an almost completed version and starting over, as well as the fact that her Tumblr account consisted largely of sound engineering tips, convinced me that this record must have sounded exactly like she wanted. So was what she wanted really K-Pop? But I was eventually won over, and the hinge for me was “Kill v. Maim”. That’s the one with the chorus that goes “B-E-H-A-V-E”, and where her K-Pop dreams are most fully realized.
JENNY HVAL: “APOCALYPSE, GIRL” A provocative and intellectually restless musician with a side career as a novelist and poet, Hval’s commitment to feminism and progressivism does not mean she has no doubts over what those ideals actually mean in practice, which gives her work an interesting dialectical edge. And if that doesn’t sound like enjoyable listening, I should also mention how funny she can be, and how consistently surprising her music is.
FRANK OCEAN: “NOSTALGIA/ULTRA” Despite the opinions of many people who have heard a lot more music than I have, I remain unconvinced by “Blonde”. And while ” Channel Orange” is an unreservedly terrific record, still I’m going with his breakthrough self-released mix tape. If Def Jam had got their shit together, I doubt an official release would have quite taken this form; the notoriously litigious Eagles would never have let the “Hotel California” rip pass, for one. Though he is only hip-hop adjacent, his unusually well-rounded and vivid female characters serve as a much-needed corrective to that genre’s still too-common misogyny. Even the Coachella pick-up with the stripper bod and off-putting coke habit is a dental student with a “brain like Berkeley.”
JAMIE BRANCH: “FLY OR DIE” One of the more startling jazz debuts of recent years, Branch seemed to emerge fully formed with the full history of the music at her fingertips, from New Orleans 2nd line to bebop to free and on forward, or sideways, to hip hop and rock.
BILL CALLAHAN: “SHEPHERD IN A SHEEPSKIN VEST” This folk-roots singer-songwriter had put out a number of records under the moniker “Smoke” before reverting to his given name. I have only heard a few of his earlier records, and while this one is not nearly as weird and primitive, against my usual instincts it sounds to me like his best. He still manages to include songs about stuff like sharing a tailor with The Incredible Hulk.
SUN KIL MOON: “BENJI” He could have called this “People Who Died” if Jim Carroll hadn’t already taken that title. Listening to Mark Kozelek’s songs is like listening to some old geezer spin tall tales you can’t stop listening to even as you are not sure you can believe a single word. I mean, did two of his relatives really die in nearly identical accidents involving aerosol spray cans? That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.
ANDY STOTT: ‘LUXURY PROBLEMS” The most striking feature of this collection of alternately ethereal and disconcertingly eerie soundscapes is the electronically processed female vocals, sampled from his high school music teacher who he hunted down for the project.
LCD SOUNDSYSTEM: “THIS IS HAPPENING” James Murphy’s hipster obsessive amalgam of dance groove, punk energy and retro-prog sonics came together on what was supposed to have been his band’s farewell. He lied, of course.
ANGEL OLSEN: “BURN YOUR FIRE FOR NO WITNESS” In retrospect, it was already apparent on her first LP that Olsen needed a larger palette than the standard country/folk format offered to contain her ambitions. So, following a well-worn path first trodden by Bob Dylan, on this one she hired a band and started rocking out. I can’t say that I foresaw that she’d eventually end up fronting a full-blown string orchestra.
WADADA LEO SMITH: “TEN FREEDOM SUMMERS” A stalwart, yet peripheral, figure in the progressive jazz scene since the 1960’s, Smith emerged belatedly as one of jazz’s major composer/performers with this ambitious 4 1/2 hour piece that earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Scored for his all-star jazz quintet and a nine-piece classical ensemble, the music is a response to key events in the American Civil Rights movement.
ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER: “REPLICA” Cobbled together into not-quite songs from brief snippets of sound sampled largely from TV commercials, it’s be easy to hear this as the detritus of our consumer culture reconstructed as aesthetic objects. Or, if you prefer, as just a bunch of weird things that sound cool.
KANYE WEST: “MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY” It’s easy to forget that we could once think of him purely as a musician. These days, its easy to forget that he’s a musician at all. This record, sprawling overlong mess that it is, remains as a reminder of his genius.