Records
An incomplete and unranked sampling of records I liked from this year: some popular, some less popular.
Cate Le Bon, “Pompeii” (Mexican Summer)
This album’s peculiarly 1979-1982 murky neo-noir hedonism compels me to pieces, its leery chorus pedal and blowsy saxophone and dissociated synth bass, somewhere between Japan/Talk Talk on opium and the Stones on St. Mark’s Place. I’m also compelled by the rigidity that anchors it: how Le Bon and her band can get something so mysterious out of arrangements that while not creatively lazy in the least, can feel as repetitive and gridded as GarageBand loops. Is it Gary Numan Voight-Kampffing himself alive through mechanical perversions of funk, or is it more human than Numan?
Bas Jan, “Baby U Know” (Lost Map)
Melissa Weikart, “Here, There” (Northern Spy)
Cal Folger Day, “Piece-dye” (Dead Lady/Witter On)
Robert Ashley’s “Perfect Lives.” The Fiery Furnaces grandma record that combines Robert Ashley’s “Perfect Lives” and Harry Partch’s “The World of Harry Partch.” Early Fairport modal folk. Indiepop girls at the Café Oto show. Conservatory girls at the Britpop night. Mental health Twitter at the “A Little Night Music” orch pit audition. Those embryonic (and pre-MAGA) Biff Rose cabaret records David Bowie loved. Art Bears, Raincoats. Robert Wyatt. The Bernie Worrell burble from “Once in a Lifetime.” The emotional promises from Mitski’s “Be the Cowboy” that “Laurel Hell” didn’t deliver on. The solo piano arrhythmia on Laura Nyro’s “Map to the Treasure.”
My Favorite, “Tender Is the Nightshift: Part One” EP (HHBTM)
Alabaster dePlume, “Gold” (International Anthem)
Kahil El’Zabar Quartet, “A Time for Healing” (Spiritmuse)
“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I remember my identity
I remember my shame
I remember the German word for ‘calculator‘
But I forget that I’m precious”
—Alabaster dePlume
Beyoncé, “Renaissance” (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia)
Destroyer, “Labyrinthitis” (Merge)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and one was the PCH and the traffic moved at 99 beats per minute and beckoned us to join Herb Alpert and Lani Hall in a surfside conga line while hijacked planes and melted reactors vibrated down the ether, and one was the leggy driveway to a bounce-haus of champagne bubbles and Lady Godiva booty. Dan Bejar aspired to make a Donna Summer record and ended up just quoting Mark E. Smith (which rules), and Beyoncé went out and made one and got Big Freedia and Grace Jones on it.
Battle Trance, “Green of Winter” (New Amsterdam)
Bill Orcutt, “Music for Four Guitars” (Palilalia)
Horse Lords, “Comradely Objects” (RVNG Intl.)
A unified electromagnetic force of pied pipers, a motley collective of Rat Czars with saxes and guitars, driving the plague out of Saxony.
The Smile, “A Light for Attracting Attention” (XL Recordings)
Office Culture, “Big Time Things” (Northern Spy)
Musos standing in their power, or at least by their power strips. The first if you like the more rhythm-driven and progressive-jazz elements of Radiohead — Can and Soft Machine and punkier Crimson, with a soupçon of Donny McCaslin Trio. Someone said “sounds like they’ve been listening to SAULT” and I’d buy that too. The second if you dig those mild-sedative “Kamakiriad” vibes, the elevator music to the clandestine swinging gallows under the Custerdome. All roads, divergent or yellow or otherwise, lead to the Fender Rhodes.
