Another Dumb List - My Ten Favorite Records From 2017
There was a time, not all that long go, when I couldn’t even
name ten albums to toss together into a year end list for this site. Things are
better (for the most part) than they were in 2014 and in 2015—and naming ten
albums from 2017 that I enjoyed was surprisingly easy. Stacking them in this
kind of order—especially, like, 10 through 7—isn’t always easy. It’s the same
questions I struggle with every year end: what makes my ninth favorite album
slightly better or more impressionable than the tenth?
I can’t answer these questions. It’s just another dumb list,
full of short and possibly pretentious blurbs that talk up albums I already
reviewed, and really liked, once.
Hope your 2017 wasn’t awful, and maybe you checked out some
of these albums. If you did, or if you read anything I was responsible for
writing, thanks. It’s not always easy keeping this blog running—I started it in
2013 because I was too depressed to be on the radio, and I spent a majority of
2015 and 2016 nearly too depressed to write, and too depressed to care about
music the way I once had. Not that it really
matters—I mean, nothing really does, but my goal for 2017 was to beat my post
count from last year. Last year, I hit an all time low of 127 posts. Right now,
including this thing you’re reading right now, I’m at 132. I didn’t beat it by
much, and I’m more selective now about what I listen to and review, but I’m
happy to see the numbers headed up instead of further down.
The Indiana based trio Cloakroom showed an abundance of
potential on 2015’s Further Out, and
two years later, the band has returned—tighter sounding and full of ambition.
Yes, they wear their influences on their sleeve—Failure and Hum comparisons
obviously come to mind, but the group works throughout Time Well’s ten tracks to make something wholly original out of
space rock, alternative, and stoner/sludge metal elements.
At a time when the idea of ‘rock music’ or a band making a
‘rock record’ is practically unheard of, Time
Well shows that there is still something interesting and compellingly
listenable that can be accomplished with a guitar, bass, and drum.
Of all the albums on this list, I’ve been sitting with Prisoner the longest, not only because
it arrived in February (way ahead of almost all of these), but it also leaked
near the tail end of 2016. Prisoner
is, by no means, a perfect album, but even the ‘best’ Ryan Adams albums aren’t
perfect—1989 falters once or twice,
and the classics like Love is Hell
and Heartbreaker all have spots
that’s bring the momentum down. But because it’s the album on this list that
I’ve spent the most time with, it has grown on me, and I’ve had the time to
figure out where I fit into it, and where it fits in with Adams’ canon.
It should come as no surprise to hear that Prisoner is a break-up record. While 1989 was his coping mechanism during his
very public divorce from Mandy Moore, it’s here that he really lets loose with
the raw emotions that stem from a marriage falling apart—at times, the song
titles read a like a cry for help and the lyrics are bleak, all of it dressed
up in music that runs the spectrum of Adams’ myriad styles, including E Street
Band theatrics, 1980s rock ‘n’ roll bombast, pensive acoustic strums, and
dreamy, shimmery Johnny Marr-esq tones
Relatively concise, Prisoner
can, at times, be uneven—but even in its less successful moments, it still
shows what a capable (and prolific) songwriter Adams is, and that taken as a
whole, it’s a strong album that is worth revisiting.
Three EPs spread across a double LP, a third of this is
technically a reissue—Goodkin’s stunning Record
of Life was originally released in 2015; this set collects it, along with
its companion EPs, both of which we released this year.
Ambitious and high concept in ways that still reveal
themselves after multiple listens, Goodkin, armed with only his 1963 Gibson
ES-125t, is a fearless songwriter, willing to put all of himself, as well as
his loved ones (both dead and alive) out there.
While each Record
is self-contained enough to work on their own, listening to all three
sequentially expands Goodkin’s universe, as you meet characters who reoccur and
you ride the emotional highs and lows while lives end but love remains. It’s an
evocative, and incredibly personal collection, but Goodkin is a smart enough
songwriter that while these songs and stories are his, the themes present are
universal enough that you not only are able to find where you fit in to his
memories set to music, but you can use these songs to soundtrack your own
moments of living, losing, and loving.
How do you follow up your debut album when your debut is an
auspicious and ambitious triple LP? Arriving two years after Washington’s The Epic, the Harmony of Difference EP brings together five loosely connected new
compositions then concludes with “Truth,” a sprawling 13 minute journey that
takes up the entire second side of the record.
One of the most admirable things about Washington as a
performer, composer, arranger, and band leader, is that despite his penchant
for high art, he tries to keep an audience in mind—much like The Epic, Harmony of Difference is never inaccessible. Sure, jazz is always
going to be a ‘smart person’s’ music, but you don’t have to be enrolled in a
MFA program or subscribe to The New York
Times to enjoy this or to take something away out of it. It’s emotional and
evocative (a feat in and of itself considering its all instrumental), it’s
dense and complicated, but it’s also structured around motifs that get stuck in
your head for days.
Play it start to finish; play it finish to start—either way,
DAMN is an impressive and admirable
album from one of hip-hop’s most forward thinking and innovative voices. An
unrelenting journey that touches on the idea of fate, coincidence,
spirituality, sin, success, failure, fear, hope, and most important of all,
race in America in 2017. It’s an angry album—it’s challenging and
confrontational, but outside of its cyclical nature, what makes it so smart is
that that while it is dense and complex, it’s never inaccessible. Lamar doesn’t
make ‘pop rap,’ but he also doesn’t alienate his listeners, even when it would
be so easy to do.
In a sense, DAMN
can be looked at as a reflection of the unrest of these times. Lamar, at age
30, is one of the most successful names in rap music, respected and lauded by a
diverse audience and critics alike—but he’s still on edge. He’s still worried
about failure, and he’s still got one foot in the streets, and that brings a
truthful grittiness and exuberance into these songs that is practically
unrivaled.
I don’t listen to nearly as much experimental, ambient, and
instrumental music as I did a few years back—it’s a tough genre to remain
committed to, simply due to how many performers there are, how prolific some of
them may be, and tough to find interesting new works in an overcrowded market.
There are a few experimental and ambient acts that I
discovered when I first became interested that I still diligently follow, and
Milwaukee’s Apollo Vermouth is one of them. Primarily the work of experimental
guitarist Alisa Rodriguez, Crashing Into
Nowhere is a chilling, haunting, and beautiful collection of pieces that
effortlessly meld elements of shoegaze, dream pop, and ambient droning.
Crashing Into Nowhere
is among the most impressive and successfully executed experimental music
simply because of how evocative it is as Rodriguez creates dense, frigid yet
inviting, cavernous sounding atmospheres that it is all too easy to get lost
in—she makes the kind of sounds that, when a piece is over, you’re actually
overcome with a sadness because you truly wish you could go on living within
those sounds for as long as possible.
Are The National the ‘American Radiohead?’ It’s a question I
wrestled with during my early listens of Sleep
Well Beast, and it’s a question I’m still not sure I know the answer to.
The album, coming a decade after their breakthrough Boxer, finds the band in a more confident, ambitious, and
experimental place.
While 2013’s Trouble
Will Find Me was the sound of a band struggling with sudden mainstream
success and growing pains, Sleep Well
Beast is the sound of a band that is still growing, but they know how to
operate within that growth. It’s the first National album to incorporate myriad
electronics—keyboards, drum machines, various other noises—at first, it’s a
little jarring, and seems a little cobbled together. And yes, sometimes it just
flat out doesn’t work (“Walk it Out.”) But overall, taken as a whole, Sleep Well Beast is, again, a
fascinating portrait of adulthood and everything that comes along with it, with
the band sounding tighter and more bombastic than ever. Matt Berninger’s
lyrics, no longer as ambiguous and fragmented as they once were in 2007,
receive assistance this time around from his wife Carin—and together, the two
have made a ‘marriage is hard’ record, an idea that is both extremely personal,
yet ideas that are widely applicable.
Rarely do you hear a debut full length that is just this
good—and in 2017, I heard two of them (see the second album on this list.) The
work of three year’s spent toiling in the studio, crippled with self-doubt over
the direction the album was taken, SZA (born Solana Rowe) recorded, scrapped,
re-wrote, and re-recorded the album a number of times before the finished
product was released.
A loosely based concept album, structured around the idea of
‘control,’ Rowe takes on her anxieties, the spaces between love and sex, gender
identity, race, and more, setting it all to an incredibly diverse soundtrack
that blends soul, R&B, pop, and hip-hop.
Rowe can sing; she can rap; sometimes she does both in the
same song. CTRL is a thought provoking,
clever, and surprisingly fun album that, like Rowe herself, demands your full
attention.
There was a span of about a month or so when Stranger in The Alps was going to be my
favorite record of 2017—it’s simply that good, and that impressive. Bridgers,
barely out of her teens, has made an absolutely striking debut release,
showcasing her unique voice—both literally and figuratively. It has a youthful
innocence in its sound, and her songwriting is wise beyond her years.
The reason Stranger in
The Alps is so successful is Bridgers’ ability to walk the line between
writing something catchy, writing something dark, and writing something with a
self-deprecating sense of humor—often times all three collide within the same
song. The album’s big single, “Motion Sickness,” is hook driven thanks to its
refrain, but it’s also a sad and funny story about her (possibly fictional?)
romantic involvement with a much older musician. She follows that with the
harrowing “Funeral,” one of my favorite songs off the record, and one the most
important songs the year for me.
She also pulls an audacious move by covering a Mark Kozelek
penned true ‘murder ballad’ as the album’s final track, pulling the song away
from Kozelek’s idiosyncratic nature, and driving it into an unrelenting and
haunting territory, structured around a hypnotic flurry of piano notes. If
you’re not familiar with the song (it’s latter-day Koz), when the violence
suddenly arrives, you’re as surprised as character who was on the receiving end
of a knife in the back.
Backed by a Secretly Canadian imprint’s money, Stranger is also, for her first time
out, surprisingly slick—“Georgia” is full of sweeping grandeur and ‘millennial whoas,’
and there a number of occasions throughout where fancy production flourishes
are sprinkled. Would the album be better, or just as good, if it were stripped
back? It’s tough to say. It arrives as a huge, bold statement, full of honesty
and stark observations on the human condition.
Baker, much like her ‘sad girl with a guitar’ peer Phoebe
Bridgers, is barely in her 20s, but she’s lived practically a thousand
lives—she’s struggled with her spirituality and faith, she’s had questions
about her sexual identity, and she’s battled addictions and is attempting to
remain sober. Following up her self-recorded debut, Sprained Ankle, Baker returns, backed by a newfound confidence in
her voice, her songwriting, and the pedigree of Matador Records—a label smart
enough to let her work in a real studio space, but didn’t push her to develop
this set of songs beyond their skeletal nature.
Part of what makes Turn
Out The Lights work is just how sparse it is—there’s very little additional
instrumentation outside of Baker’s guitar strums and piano tinkles. That
minimalistic approach lends itself well to letting her lyrics, and her voice
(that voice, you guys) take center stage. These songs are stark; they are
harrowing; a word like ‘sad’ or an expression like ‘heartbreaking’ doesn’t do
this album justice. This thing is out for blood, and it will leave you a god
damn mess every time you listen to it.
Baker’s voice is so powerful, so telling, that it should be
registered as a lethal weapon—she makes no attempt to hide that with her
otherworldly, devastating howl at the end of “Appointments,” during the climax
of the album’s titular track, or during the gorgeous, emotional closing “Claws
in Your Back”—and if that song doesn’t make you a believer, I don’t know what
else Baker has to do to convince you she’s the real fucking deal.
Music that knocks the wind out of you like this doesn’t come
along very often, and it is really something to behold when it does. Julien
Baker is a national treasure—I don’t say that in jest—and she’s made a record
that pulls you in for an unexpectedly visceral experience.
Hey Kevin, I made a playlist of these albums and have been listening to them non-stop since this post. Loving the Kamasi Washington, SZA, Kendrick Lamar, and Joe Goodkin at this point. Your top picks I think will take me longer to appreciate. Beautiful, but I'm pretty slow to pick up on lyrics, as I always tend to hear the music first. Thanks a ton for this list!
ReplyDeletehey there whoever you are. thanks for reading, and thanks for digging into these albums. i hope you enjoy them as much as i have. and thanks for the support all the way around- both of these artists and of this site.
DeleteThis might tag who I am now... if not, it's Dominic. I don't often read blogs, but when I do, I chose Anhedonic Headhpones!
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