Hi dears, thanks for reading. Here’s my ninth annual year-end music writeup and Spotify playlist, the story of the art that carried me through. May 2024 be a year for the peace, dignity, and self-determination of all people. Please give to the Middle East Children’s Alliance and please call your representatives to demand a ceasefire in Gaza.
One other thing before I roll: Spotify has always, always, always been terrible for artists and, as I learned from Damon Krukowski’s Substack, it’s now getting worse, with tracks getting fewer than 1,000 streams per year no longer earning any royalties at all. So: show me your Bandcamp Wrapped. Buy digital downloads and cassettes and CDs and beautiful vinyl, buy merch direct from artists at shows! Support the artists you adore!
Mirrorballs, Modernist Strings, Famous Lips and Luxury Robots: Thirty Songs for a New Year
One throughline of my listening this year is Finn’s new affection—nurtured by dinky meme songs and samples seeping their way up through gamer culture—for old house, disco, and club music. We’ve had a lot of drives boosted by “Better Off Alone,” “Rhythm of the Night,” “Baby I’m Yours,” and “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” and I’ve spent hours on my own immersed in old house music comps and DJ mixes, big beats built to go as fast as your own pounding heart, hooked by the yearning, lust, cheer, and defiance of the anonymous vocalists. It was in this sensitized state that I got hit by Disclosure’s Alchemy, the Lawrence brothers’ first record since being freed from their major-label contract, and I just love it: it’s a lean, joyful, funky album with no star guests or pop feints, just brisk beats (techno has gotten fast!) and vocal fragments (“talk on the phone,” “little bit in love,” “higher than ever before”) caught in the same surge. It’s rare that I’m sad a record isn’t longer; I wish Alchemy was.
Another delight this year has been the recent reissue of a compilation of DJ and producer Alan Braxe’s French-touch house productions, The Upper Cuts. This is luxury robot music. Compared to house music’s Chicago or New York roots, Braxe’s productions owe much less to soul than they do to video game synths, 70s soft rock and AOR, and soundtrack driving-scene pulses. The Upper Cuts strips songs down to single tracks or vibes—sometimes soothingly samey all the way through, sometimes strikingly modulated between two lines—that bring you up to cruising speed and keep you there. French-touch house is also the beating android heart of my I-think-favorite song of the year, Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Psychedelic Switch”: her latest thesis on being swept away, set to a beat that intentionally quotes Daft Punk’s “One More Time”; raved about it on here a few months ago. For something with a little more ravey rock ‘n roll uplift, I was thrilled and moved by the Chemical Brothers’ “Skipping Like a Stone” (ft. Beck).
By contrast, Berlin-based, Peruvian-born DJ Sofia Kourtesis’s album Madres has just about nothing to do with the robotic luxury of French touch or the anonymous collective utopianism of rave. Kourtesis’s music sounds instead like the gathering place for a real right-now community, friends, kin, singing neighbors. This sense of communal life is one of the things I most loved about old house music, and it’s all over Madres.
The other big throughline of my listening this year is: pop. We’re in a moment where there’s an absolute embarrassment of good pop music, and my favorites of the year were Olivia Rodrigo, Caroline Polachek, and my suave skinny gawky boys Troye Sivan and (last year’s album finally caught me) Harry Styles. Rodrigo is just hugely talented. Not every song on Guts is all the way there, but the best songs manage to split the difference between pop punk (wit, spite, self-pity) and pop balladry (grandiosity, self-declaration). Who on earth has this much self-possession in a life as weird as Rodrigo’s, of teenage feelings, fairweather friends, and dashing parasitic men?
My partner Anna is a singer, and she tells me that Caroline Polachek is the most technically proficient pop vocalist she’s ever heard; her tune “Billions” lifts me. (Oh and speaking of single tunes, Lana Del Rey’s “A&W” was the song from heterogeneous weirdness of Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. that got me. Still have never loved a record of hers all the way through but the deliberate patchwork of Ocean has gotten me closest to fathoming her thing.)
Harry and Troye, meanwhile, make for an interesting contrast: the lyrics on Harry’s House are quick shots, glimpses rather than stories, and Styles is unattached, unbothered by heartbreak, not swept away even when the music goes for uplift. Hosts don’t lay their feelings on their guests, but they may daydream with you over a drink, open their arms to offer comfort and reassurance, give wise advice: Harry gives us all these. Troye, on the other hand, is sweating right there next to us, giving us the full boyfriend experience: he’s hornier, more immediate, quicker to swoon, quicker to get his heart broken.
Far and away my favorite reissue of the year was Just a Touch: Underground UK Soul compiled by DJ Sam Don (not on Spotify; get it on Bandcamp through the Edinburgh crate-diggers Athens of the North). My love of Just a Touch is a love of a sound—like the first time I heard Giant Steps or Country Life or London Calling, a rush of joy at discovering that there was music that felt this way. The context I have for UK soul isn’t much more than Sade and the Wild Bunch, but the music here instantly signifies: rainy nights, mirrorballs, sharp outfits, converted basements, tear-stained letters. The arrangements are homespun, the mics are cheap, the singers sound like they stepped straight off a dancefloor or out from a bedroom mirror where they’d been lipsyncing, and the music is a joy. Speaking of soul, Jessie Ware’s That! Feels Good! is jubilantly pleasure-motivated (the first song repeats “that feels good / do it again / do it again” and the last song is Ware singing about the power of her lips), romantic, and free; it’s a handful of thrown glitter that instantly sweeps away all the beigey adult-contemporary seriousness of her last record. Nothing serious at all about PinkPantheress’s “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2” with Ice Spice: a whole breakup boost in two minutes.
Special mention too to the reissue of Cymande’s self-titled debut, a crucial soundtrack of 70s black London that threads together soul, jazz fusion, rock guitar, and Rasta folklore; I’ve never heard anything that quite strikes this range of timbres with this ease. Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge’s Jazz Is Dead label put out my favorite record of their whole long series of collaborations with neglected past masters: eight songs by bassist Henry “Skipper” Franklin; “A Song for Sigrid” is my favorite, an elegant eerie tune whose melody reminds me of Debussy. I was also sweet on Willie Nelson’s I Don’t Know a Thing about Love, a collection from this 90 year old fountain of life of funny rueful old songs by Harlan Howard.
When I’ve wanted to open my windows this month, I’ve blasted Piconema: East African Hits on the Colombian Coast for my neighbors. Over the 1970s, imported 12-inches of Kenyan benga music—intricate, breezy, swinging pop—swept Colombia’s coastal cities of Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Santa Marta. Just as, fifteen years earlier, American rhythm and blues singles sparked Jamaica’s sound system culture and nurtured the creative explosions of ska and reggae, these benga records, among the other African imports blasted at roaming street clubs called picós, lit a fire among Colombian musicians. Listen and you’ll feel why: the music is light and rhythmically twisty, funky without pounding on you, guitar-driven and horn-sweetened. It doesn’t build to ecstasy like the heavenly rumba and soukous being made around the same time next door in the Congo; it leaps instead for a sweet spot and sways there for eight or nine minutes. Another saving-it-up-for-sunny-days record is Amaarae’s Fountain Baby, the first record in an Afrobeats idiom I’ve loved all the way through: Amaarae, rooted in Accra and the Bronx, is horny and giddy, and her production blows way past the sameyness of a lot of Afrobeats to work in live horns, atmospheric guitar, Neptunes samples, and even twerpy mall punk.
One of the things that’s made made me happiest in my listening this year is indie’s deepening engagement with 80s soul music. Indie bands I loved when I was younger aimed earlier, nailing girl groups’ vampy drama or Philly soul’s emotional gigantism; they could approach 60s Motown timbres with formal neatness or irreverent daydreaminess. But I didn’t hear singers rooted in indie who had the technical skill or emotional nuance to make something as polished and nocturnal as Anita Baker or Sade (maybe they’ve always been out there and I’ve just missed them?), which is what made Nilüfer Yanya’s PAINLESS and Meernaa’s So Far So Good such pleasurable surprises this year. Yanya, like Meernaa’s Carly Bond, has a hushed, sensitive contralto voice, sometimes yearning, sometimes amused; PAINLESS has as much to do with PJ Harvey and Elvis Costello as it does with Diamond Life but the vitality and economical flair of the music still satisfies the same itch as 80s soul. Bond’s lead guitar, meanwhile, is as wild as her singing is subtle, and her songwriting is twisty; So Far So Good took me a few listens to fully enter, but it’s now the record (maybe tied with Just a Touch) I’ve played most this year.
Your Heart Breaks’ The Wrack Line is a bursting ragged-edged heartful double album from Clyde Peterson and his stellar band, a social record, living-room intimate, with guest vocals from indie lifers like David Christian, Theo Hilton, and Madeline Adams. Speaking of lifers, you should hear Jeffrey Lewis’s Asides & B-Sides 2014-2018 and the quiet tunes from Yo La Tengo’s new one. The Clientele’s I Am Not There Anymore is a roundabout, slow-growing grief record, bandleader Alasdair MacLean’s album in memory of his mom, who died twenty-five years ago; it’s also a leap out of the dead end of the immaculate craft and fatigued pop cosmopolitanism of the band’s last few records. Anymore includes instrumental interludes, sputtery drum-loops, spoken Mina Loy-ish recitations, songs clipped to less than a minute or extended past eight, and intermittent harsh Second Viennese School-type strings: it’s telling that when the Clientele get weird, it’s still a weirdness firmly rooted in the past, literary modernism and 60s avant-garde pop. Restless intransigent weirdness; lifelong grief; fanatic attention to detail: this is a multitudinous record and I’m still absorbing it. Sufjan Stevens’s Javelin—after the hermetic madness of Ascension and the side-stroll of Beginner’s Mind—feels “classical,” consciously pointing back to his earlier stuff; it’s mythic, intimate, lush, renewing itself through grief.
I also cannot get enough of Nastyfacts’ Drive My Car + 2 EP (not on Spotify), a forty-year-old EP of absolute perfect teenage punk led by KB Boyce.
R&B-rooted music: Janelle Monae still can’t shake her A-student/tryhard fussiness; Jamila Woods is musically ingenious but gets a little homiletic and teachy on Water Made Us, but each of their new records had a song I absolutely loved: “Know Better” with Seun Kuti and “Tiny Garden” with duendita.
No contest for the two rap records I loved best this year: Noname’s Sundial and billy woods and Kenny Seagal’s Maps. Noname’s third record is restless, probing, economical, and intelligent, and it has some of the best live-band grooves I’ve ever heard (who on earth is that bass player?). It’s a community-spirited affair, like Madres, and Noname is gleeful both talking shit and chewing on complex issues—“Toxic” and “Namesake” tackle, respectively, relationships and political tensions that are knottier than rappers usually go for. As for Maps: woods has been a rapper it’s been easier for me to admire than love. His glowery, sober, weary tone and splintered harsh beats reward close attention but haven’t given me much pleasure till this record, where Seagal’s production adds a little humor and drama and the travel concept keeps woods’s writing focused. “Dubstep drift in the window, I sit at the desk / It’s a party outside, some half-, some overdressed.” “One sip of New York City tapwater, I'm back dialed in / Last car in the last train, we piled in.” He’s warmer than Ka and has more variety of tone than Earl Sweatshirt, and here the balance of rolling music and serious-minded rhymes is rich enough that I want to hop on their plane with them. Other joys in rap this year were: Baby Keem and Kendrick Lamar’s “The Hillbillies” and Bambii and Lady Lyke’s “Wicked Gyal.” “Hillbillies” is a totally incorrigible summer jam where two short kings playact as short-king soccer stars (Neymar and Messi) and crack each other up about buying property and playing celibate over a totally amped-up mutant Jersey club/Bon Iver beat. “Wicked Gyal” is I guess “progressive” dancehall—a squiggly, bursting track that shows off how much Bambii knows about jungle and rave—with a bullet-spit flow over it.
That’s it, my dears! Much love to you!
I love your writing so much! It makes me wish I knew more about music or that I pay as much attention to anything as you pay to what goes in your ears! Happy New Year!