welp it’s my top 20 of 2020

16 min readMay 27, 2021

Zara McFarlane — Songs of an Unknown Tongue

Every year I hear a jazz album that reaffirms my adamant belief that jazz is the most important genre of music developed in Modernity, and also probably ever. Songs of an Unknown Tongue is the most recent addition to this venerable corpus. McFarlane’s voice is a phenomenal force by itself (you don’t need to be a jazzhead to appreciate that), but when her vox gets upraised by Kwake Bass and Wu-lu’s mesmeric, swaying production???

me:

The two meld Jamaican folk rhythms and some of the sleekest synth work I’ve heard in a good while into a prismatic re-celebration of various rituals, rites, and traditions of McFarlane’s ancestral home, a reclamation of cultural bonds aggressed by diasporic distance.

McFarlane is one of the most ambitious, commanding voices in modern jazz, and honestly, you should probably stop reading, listen to this utterly vital album, and come back to the article at a later point.

Donny Benét — Mr. Experience

Have you ever wondered what a ménage à trois synthesis of Pet Shop Boys, Keith Sweat, and Mel Tormé would sound like? It sounds like sex, tolerably sweaty, gastrocnemius-cramping sex.

Late 20th-century kitsch has never sounded so genuinely suave, so heartily honest. Truly fuck the American dictatorship for letting covid spread unchecked, because this album makes me want to take my gimlet to the dance floor and just schwastedly tango (alone, like a magnificent dickhead). How does one fathom basslines this horny into existence??? Stfu and explain it to me right now. You will have to take a cold shower after listening to Donny croon. At the very least, you should wash your hands.

This album is a thrumming cocktail of pure disco neon and you’re gonna want to slarp it down.

pulses. — Speak It Into Existence

It’s rush hour (it’s rush hour) Big heart power (big heart power) No traffic jam (no jam, no jam) Gassed up big man (gassed up big man)

^^^A quote unquote emo band raps that^^^

Historically, I have found “party” emo to be insufferable. pulses., however, isn’t cornball fratcore bullshit. They funk around. They shred with math rock freneticism. They belt out those lighters-in-the-air post-hardcore choruses. This is a band that likes to have a good time, but unlike a lot of other overly jubilant pop outfits on odious labels that will go unmentioned, without sacrificing their chops as musicians or the groovy ass microcosms each track,,,well, shouts into existence.

So much post-hardcore takes itself so fucking seriously, while simultaneously hot-farting out the most embarrassing, dopey, histrionic dreck. Speak It Into Existence expands upon the multifaceted, proggy approach of the 2010s, but without the ostentatious, pseudo-complex self-satisfaction purportedly progressive guitar music infamously embodies.

Also, pulses. manage to make me actually enjoy Max Bemis’s voice, which is, for real, an incredible, unprecedented achievement.

Yazzus — It’s Ya Girl’s Bootlegs

You know. I could sit here in my studio apartment and crack my neck too much and try to explain to you how hard this album slaps and whips and bangs and rips in a charming, novel way, but honestly, that could very well obscure the fundamental essence of this collection: ultra pure supra mega laser beam heat.

Each track will absolutely knock you to your ass, into a gloopy, perspiring jumble of yourself, and you will fucking love it, jump up like a Soviet gymnast, and sashay back for more.

This is a vast collection. 30 megaton thumpers. So, start clenching. Cause there’s gonna be some impacts, and detonations, and various ecstatic collapses. I would suggest listening to it during a long summer vacay drive, but also I don’t want you to gottablast it into a ravine going 85. Please listen to these bootlegs responsibly.

Bruges — A Thread of Light

Post-metal? Post-punk? Post-hardcore?

Maya LaMacchia — Inside Out

I’m a sommelier, but for lofi records. There is no training for this title. There is also 0 pay and benefits.

A not unnoticeable number of contemporary lofi folk artists like to whispershout how sad and bummed they are (from their bedrooms — with like 1000s of dollars worth of recording equipment they use to approximate the quality of their laptop mic). Considering this coterie cranks out chill vibes music that solely exists for the assembly line of~how relatable~ Spotify indie playlists, makes sense. LaMacchia is one of the select lofi-ers that actually writes bedroomy folk that isn’t desperately trying to latch onto the bedroom algorithm. And for that, I express ceaseless gratitude.

There is a conflict of enthusiasm and exasperation in each note of Inside Out. Even during the peppy strumming and aluminum picking, you can hear a gentle ire underlying LaMacchia’s voice. But, it’s not offputtingly belligerent. In fact, her critical recollections are quite comely:

But don’t be afraid, it’s not too bright
The sky is gray and you’re always right

I can’t find any internet presence aside from LaMacchia’s bandcamp. Considering we live in an era that incentivizes typing the dumbest shit and cultivating the most grating opinions possible online, I find that truly laudable. This is a musician focused on their work.

Payroll Giovanni & Peezy — Ghetto Rich N****z

I probably should not be allowed to listen to this album. I do not make money. I do not ball out. Also, I am not cool.

But fuck this album is good.

Back in 2015, Tyler, the Creator dropped some tweets that basically declared “to be taken seriously in rap, you either have to make party music, or you have to be super conscious. And if you do anything different, you’re shrugged off.” He had a point, although I think he overestimated the nouveau quality of transitioning from a maj7th to a min9th chord.

Giovanni and Peezy drop bangers. That’s apparent. But their boasts are always predicated by observations on the sheer racist violence of American economic hierarchy. They’ve witnessed the inhumanity of our rusting empire, and they’re going to describe it without restraint, all over a club beat that could incite frenzied reverie in a crowd of geriatric trumpites.

There doesn’t have to be a demarcation between sociopolitical awareness and wall-toppling 808 kicks. Payroll and Peezy know what the fuck they’re doing.

Born in a family where nobody had a job
You either sell dope or sell dope, you nothin’ if you rob (No)
I engage in crack sales, bitch, I’m married to the mob (Mob shit)
Stacks sloppy and fat, just a motherfuckin’ slob (Yeah)

Jake Blount — Spider Tales

Before I do this mini-review, a reminder: Black America invented basically all American music. Not just hip hop. Not just rock. Not just edm. All of it, and that includes what’s known as country and western music too. Spider Tales will remind you.

History is dialectical. It imposes on the present. The barbaric conditions that birthed roots music are, in many forms, still insidiously metastasizing from the past. Blount understands this. But also, he’s not a fatalist. He reaches backward to grasp the beauty of this past as well, its elder folk composition both so agonizing and ravishing.

Euro settlers have extracted, appropriated, and commodified so much art from the fringes of its artificial societies, and yet, it is still culturally null. Spider Tales rejects that whole colonial enterprise. This album is a politically and aesthetically necessary collection of music erroneously dubbed “American.” It’s not that at all. The lot of country, especially in 2021, is somewhere between thievery and bastardization. This is black and indigenous roots music, true proletarian narration, and it is so much more than the sadistic violence that is ordinary Americana.

LEYA — Flood Dream

If you are tuned into contemporary classical music, even only slightly like myself, you’ve probably seen the niche meme “experimental musicians are just classical composers that quit.” It’s intentionally cheeky and self-deprecating. Most of the people doing the quipping are the experimental musicians themselves. Thank all that’s pure for conscientious classical objectors, because we get this album out of ‘em.

The tension between unnerving harp plucks and flourishing ‘verbed vox engenders an intimidatingly gorgeous domain. Considering just how starkly forceful these compositions are, deeming this album experimental, or neo-classical, or soundscapery, seems hugely reductive; I would earnestly consider it “ambient post-hardcore.”

You shouldn’t fall asleep to Flood Dream. You’d definitely be cast into a very fucked series of psychological thriller dreamscapes. This is uncommonly rewarding ambiance that you’re going to want to consciously experience.

Methwitch — INDWELL

CW: This album is unremitting violence. I’m not being flippant with the CW. This album could really hurt if you just delve into it without care. Also, I don’t necessarily mean literal, described violence, although there is quite a lot of that (it’s metal obv).

What I’m getting at here is, sonically, this album summons the psychic aftermath of strife, decay, and death. I listen to quite a bit of heavy music, and generally I find most of it to be conscious of the theatrics of brutality. That’s not a criticism. It’s one of the main reasons I seek out outwardly gruesome music.

And then there’s bands like Methwitch: It’s not metal kitsch for them. They are making utterly abject, pitiless music.

Much of this ghastliness is produced via maniacally calamitous industrial manipulation. Mass Effect Reaper shit. Mechanized guillotine guitars and gatling clips of percussive feedback are deployed with savage fastidiousness, a precision matched by cyberjotunn drumming that would make the terminator from T2 piss WD40.

Fuckin’ robots dawg.

Concisely, uhhhhh, this is not easy music. Approach with caution.

Rashied Ali & Frank Lowe — Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions

Technically this is a rerelease, but considering the effort that went into remastering it and prepping it for 2020, might as well consider it an entirely new recording.

Do you think you’re pretty good at your instruments? Yeah? You do? You’re not as good as Rashied Ali and Frank Lowe. They’re the standard now. Just how it goes. Don’t be sad. You get to listen to Rashied Ali and Frank Lowe! A Blessing!

Literally every day online, no matter what words I mute, no matter which presences I unfollow, I see vapid declarations regarding the meaninglessness of avant-garde art from horrifically myopic idiots who fancy themselves perceptive truthtellers warring against the imaginary elitism of transgressive material (as well all know, the Western bourgeoisie loves radical, black free jazz).

Toothed, yet lithe — virtuosic, yet unhinged, Duo Exchange really seems more like a fervent debate between two utterly charismatic jazz masters. If you like jazz, or if you just enjoy punky, rebellious shit in general, this is mandatory listening.

Jake McKelvie and the Countertops — Here’s What You Do

McKelvie is easily in the top 10, probably top 5, of contemporary lyricists. The dude is p e r c e p t i v e. Like, I can’t help it. I’m a musician and writer and I am so fucking jealous of his eye and smartphone notes app. Do you make guitar-centric stuff? Study the Countertops. Why did you all make The Front Bottoms alt-popular and not the Countertops? Explain that to me. Why?

I have to be forthright. I hate a lot of folksy rock shit. The Aughts and the 2010s were an exceptionally terrible time for it. Do you remember the clone proliferation of suspenders-beard-wave? And I’m not just talking the obvious Mumford & Sons detritus. I’m talking Fleet Foxes and Father Jeff Joel John Misty and Dr. Dog and all that glorified faux-rustic festival jam band Caribou Coffee bullshit. I find it all so loathsome.

Here’s What You Do totally disregards the inane pageantry. The band plays a familiar poppy rock, albeit with some exceptionally well-bridged bridges. Not saying they’re rudimentary musicians, this is a very tight set of songs, but the CTs don’t really need to pivot into tangents of rhythmic and structural weirdness when they’re trying to provide stable footing for McKelvie’s casually anxious shimmy shimmy wordplay.

“I’m a poor conversationer, semi-vacationer, perfect-reception-but-can’t-stand-the-stationer.”

McKelvie can take a slew of homey idioms, pull them inside out, scramble them into a droll narrative, and uncover some uncommon poignancy within acutely common colloquial speak. The fact this band has only 1200 listeners on Spotify is, just, absolutely unacceptable. Fix that.

H31R — ve·loc·i·ty

If you live on the east coast, especially if you live near New York City, it is imperative you do the most to see H31R. I’m thousands of miles away. Please. Do it for me? As someone yet to be vaxxed, this record has got me despairing and fiending for a block party or a boiler room mix. Shit. I would take an iHome in a living room at this point.

H31R is the producer x poet duo of JWords and Maassai, two Brooklyn adepts busy with the creation of enrapturing, club-centric hip hop. I’m far from a New Yorker. I’m not gonna make any grand proclamations regarding Brooklyn hip hop, but if you had blindfolded me prior to September 2020 and played me a single from this LP, I’m pretty confident I would have been like “Oh yeah. This definitely sounds like peak Brooklyn dance and rap.”

Stoic boom bap kicks and tenebrous pads wax into each other with recurrence somewhere at the intersection of IDM, DnB, and jazzy neosoul loopsmithing. Each beat knocks hard, definitely, but there’s a slipperiness to the synth-centric composition, a not-too-mellow fluidity that matches Maassai’s intonation.

That’s peak NYC hip hop, right? Severe, but chill. Heavy, but not ungainly. It has to be.

Indoor Voices — Animal

Animal. / Animal I know. / They came along, unbolted the lock. (They know how.)

The Top 3 Words People Use Without Knowing What They Actually Mean Are

Socialism
Christ
Shoegaze

If I have to read one more fucking article, nominally about shoegaze, referencing Billy Corgan and his glistening, soppy brow, my teeth will rot off my jawbone.

Contrary to the prevailing DIY consensus, shoegaze is not when you play pop rock while mixing chorus and fuzz pedals. The pillars of the genre endeavored to decompose the timbre of the electric guitar into a basal sonic canvas that could be rendered into tones distinctly more tractable than what their rockist peers were strumming out. Animal flourishes within this ambitious current, with ambient prowess.

Imagine a super thin, super soft bedsheet laid over you. Now imagine another. No keep imagining more and more and more until you have envisioned yourself underneath a royally silken weighted blanket. Indoor Voices’s sustained layers of pad and string vibrantly compound, anchoring you down with a motion not quite placid, but not quite discontented either.

Animal, much like ASDIG’s Ashes Grammar or Flying Saucer Attack’s Further, is stratospheric, upper echelon gaze. No Mellon Collie rockstar bullshit.

Rhodri Davies — Telyn Rawn

First off: Cofiwch Dryweryn

Secondly: Get stoked on some more harp music.

Davies prefaces this album with

Doeth yw ymadrawdd hawdd hoyw
Y delyn o rawn duloyw.
Wise is the easy lively expression
of the harp of shining black horsehair.
Iolo Goch (14eg ganrif / 14th century)

They play this album with said horsehair harp. I have heard little music in my young 25 years that resembles the turbulently gorgeous intricacy of this album. The discordance of modern avant-garde experimentalism and enticing folk melody trade bars, abruptly pivoting, and then spiraling, and then upturning itself with capricious intent.

There are literally thousands of metal bands that have tried to scribe a medieval narrative with a contemporaneous gaze. Some have been more successful than others. None really come close to this. This album frenetically flits back and forth from the 14th to the 21st century; the sound is folkloric, but the improvisatory musicianship is inarguably of the right now.

Wales does not get love. When people talk about Celtic music, they invariably refer to Dropkick Murphys (Boston is not Ireland) or some Scottish indie pop band that does not make Celtic music. If Telyn Rawn is the first album out of Wales that you ever hear, you’re off to an exceptional start. If it’s the first experimental album you vibe to, I truly envy you.

Ego Ella May — Honey For Wounds

Honey For Wounds was the perfect album for what was the most sequestered year of many of our lives.

Rona spread as both a virus and a miasma of anxiety. If you are at all like me, you probably found yourself often overcome with pestilently depressive phases. People are getting vaxxed more and more, but if you’re still getting Batista bombed by the psychic repercussions of Covid-19, you will find this record curative.

Ego Ella May sings with serene acerbity. They’re talking shit, on those “running from the burn,” on those who expect every rnb singer to be a sex addict, on the many exorbitantly loaded Anglo-Saxon dickheads, but their voice shivers through your neurons like they have a PhD in ASMR. May’s Aoedian vox leaves very few unfuckedwith; it’s a beautiful skewering. You’ll wish she was throwing shade at you personally just so you can have another track.

Outwardly, this is a neosoul album. But unlike a lot of post-Weeknd rnb, it doesn’t rely on the ersatz studio smokiness that has come to dominate so much pop music. Yeah, there’s a lot of dusky synths you’ll want to hack a dart to, but (despite the breadth of adroit producers all with their own cool, cool grasp on jazz and blues), Honey For Wounds resounds with the type of candid intercourse you’d hear between an striking live band and their rapt audience.

Sary Moussa — Imbalance

When I started to write this, Israel began to amp up its genocidal assault on the Palestinian people, furthering a lengthy campaign of settler colonial expansion in the Levant.

Moussa composes in Beirut, and while they may be separated from Gaza City by hundreds of kilometers, their music is in no way distanced from the violence — ceasefire — more violence — again — again — again inflicted upon the eastern Mediterranean by Western Euro-American empire. The undulating interchange of tumult and harmony on this record makes that harrowingly evident.

Imbalance’s surges will overawe you. They will confound you. How can electronic thrums and squelches and clangors so meticulously engineered sound as organic as any small ensemble, as a flock of whiskered terns, as wet sand? How can manipulated gray noise feel so intimately personal, as if it were as common as a string section, or in Moussa’s case, a Greek Catholic choir?

Forgive me for using the term “liminal space” but this album actually, and I really mean it, represents the concept. Imbalance reverberates at the threshold of the orchestral and the cyborgian, horror and sublimity, colony and metropole. Also, your old favorite artists and your new favorite artist.

CW: Suicide

XYLTHIA — Immortality Through Quantum Suicide

Interplanetary/intergalactic/interdimensional death metal is kind of having a moment right now. I’m not necessarily opposed to it, but I find that many bands have a lot of trouble with depicting the unrelenting, chaotic enormity of the Erebus that is outer space. So many miss, and somehow, against all celestial odds, they don’t land among the stars.

XYLTHIA is not aiming for the casual gravity of a system akin to our Sol. Nick Stanger, the project’s sole voidfaring instrumentalist, hyperthrusts the damned personas of the record into the abyssal “infinite time” of “1000 cuts” and “failed gods.” This is not death metal. This is undying metal. This is the interminable-torture-of-undying-metal, and it is unfathomably grotesque. Hell yeah fuck yeah.

They say if you fall into a black hole, the gravitational difference between your feet and your head would basically cause you to stretch out like cosmic taffy, your lower half being pulled into the darkness at a much more rapid rate than your top half. Also, you would be really dead. Your body would be mangled into flesh pasta and then you’d be sucked into the event horizon and poof right on out of everything we know about space and reality and all that horrifying scifi bullshit.

That’s what this album sounds like: Protogenoi riffage, battle-droid-in-corpse-paint blastbeats, pulsar screams, and rhythmic pandemonium that can only be described as Azathothian.

This album atomically destabilizes you. This album presages Earth itself being devoured by an incomprehensibly vile archfiend from beyond the limits of existence. This album makes most mathcore sound like Maroon 5.

Chouk Bwa & The Ångstromers — Vodou Alé

Folktronic music, specifically Western folktronic music, trends towards the template of “cowboy chords on an acoustic guitar with a few backing synthesizers.” I’m not saying it’s unanimously stale, but I’m also not going to be making a list of my top 100 folktronica albums anytime soon. Chouk Bwa & The Ångstromers demonstrate that roots music and minimalistic, yet clubby, electronica can be polymerized into newfound, pulsating forms that adamantly demand one’s ear, and command one’s feet.

Vodou Alé throbs. The drums are very obviously the underpinning of the entire record, traditionally performed, digitally accentuated. But, to be clear, this album should not be reduced to mere kicks and claps, uncomplicated background for the sweaty basement dancefloor of a summertime house party.

Chouk Bwa play and sing with a passion that can cycle from rhapsodic to disconsolate in a few beats. Often, the rapture and woe overlap, exacerbating each other, amplifying the impact of each vigorous bass drum hit. The Ångstromers complement this dynamic with a foundation of sub bass synth and some exceptionally galvanic EQ’ing. The kinetic force of each pump is masterfully captured.

I’m pretty confident this is the best percussion performance of 2020. It is woefully overlooked. You can and should change that.

Xyla — Ways

“There are a million different ways that things can go.”

Xyla introduces their record with a statement that I think most of us underestimate. Life really can, and does, branch off into an uncountable number of neutral incidents, unfortunate plights, and fortuitous moments. You kind of just have to accept and/or sublimate the entropy and serendipity of the day to day in order to be a functioning person.

Ways refuses to semi-apprehensively concede to disorder. This album embraces involution and vagary with the up-tempo enthusiasm of a footwork maven.

Unlike a lot of clubhead producers, Xyla has a background in classical performance. It’s not necessarily a credential one needs to construct bangers, but it certainly explains their affinity for empyrean swells and restlessly harmonic tension-building (that will assuredly rouse an “ooooooh” out of you). These tracks flare with symphonic elegance, gigajoule 808s erupting out of winsome bleep bloops and luxuriant, chorused out keys.

The vibes here are far more than immaculate. They are apotheosized.

You need to let this elevated rave music suffuse through your nucleotides.

Here’s hoping we can all go out and dance again soon.