2024 in Review

It’s been yet another strange year, dominated once again by health concerns. I didn’t see many shows (and only one that I bothered to review), but I performed live four times with Transchor Plänterwald 2022 and three times with Soltero, and we released a new recording of “A True Indication”! As has apparently become tradition, here are my favorite releases of 2024:

• Cup Collector - On the Wing - A half hour of warm, soothing analogue synth drones. CC also released the wonderfully titled A Memory Warped by Time, which is darker, more experimental, and fairly challenging.
• The Cure - Songs of a Lost World - Their first album of consequence since Bloodflowers in 2000, uncoincidentally also coproduced with Paul Corkett. It is unmistakably The Cure, and sounds very much in the same vein as Bloodflowers, but hits dark nerves that they never quite reached before. Robert Smith may bemoan aging a little too melodramatically, but his voice is still in good form (excepting a few screechy stretches) and his trademark guitar riffs and 6-string bass leads are as impressive as ever. I can’t say the same for Reeves Gabrels’ guitar when it strays too far from texture into misplaced flashy solos, but that’s made up for by Simon Gallup’s reverberant bass, which underpins and drives the whole album. They should be proud to have put out such a good album after so many years!
• Dummy - Free Energy - delightful, playful, experimental, psychedelic shoegaze.
• Elephant Stone - Back into the Dream - Charmingly throwback psychedelia with sitar and tabla. The lyrics about depression, politics, and the pandemic really strike a chord with me. This band just keeps getting better with time.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor - No Title As of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead - Given the defeated, grieving title, the weeping guitars and sparse, sad strokes of violin should come as no surprise. It’s perhaps their album with the heaviest emotional tone yet, which is saying something. There are still moments of uplifting celebration, but perhaps fewer than most Godspeed albums.
• International Music - Endless Rüttenscheid - Deceptively simple melancholic folk rock with subtle German wit and a hint of Krautrock. I love the prominent bass and manifold harmonies. The wild psychedelia of the aptly-named “Kraut” is a jam.
• Lightning Bug - No Paradise - The shoegaze is pretty much gone, but their production has gotten even more elaborate. I might prefer the lushness of A Color of the Sky (2021), but there are more moods and atmospheres here, and even if many are dark, there is still a playfulness and sense of hope. The vocal prowess, rhythmic variation, and mixing have leveled up as well.
• Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk - Post-vaporwave psychedelic pop with social commentary about self-image, self-improvement, and interfacing with the internet. The points of view are hard to follow but the vibe utterly captures a slice of modern life.
• Memorials - Memorial Waterslides - Verity Susman of Electrelane and Matthew Simms of post-2010 Wire continue the experimentation that both their biggest bands are known for, with an emphasis on tape loops and historical literary women. The album title was inspired by the Susan Sontag Memorial Water Slide at the Austin Dyke March, which in 2023 was apparently based at Cheer Up Charlie’s, my favorite bar and SXSW venue when I lived in Austin.
• Chappell Roan - “Good Luck, Babe!” - A banger about comphet!? I came late to the party but it’s rare that pop music speaks to me so well. I swear it’s not just that she’s from Missouri and wore a Kansas City sweatshirt in the “California” video.
• Nala Sinephro - Endlessness - Apparently I like ambient jazz? The arrangements are consistently impressive, but the synths are what really do it for me.
• St. Vincent - All Born Screaming - I think I liked Daddy’s Home (2021) more than everyone else, but this is even better. It’s closer to her career bests (Strange Mercy, 2011, and St. Vincent, 2014), but more eclectic and emotionally authentic. Clark runs through genres like a box of chocolates. I particularly like the funk and electronic soundscapes, and the Nine Inch Nails bits speak to some deep part of my soul that I too easily forget about.

Here are a few honorable mentions:

• Einstürzende Neubauten - Rampen (apm: alien pop music) - Alien, certainly. Pop, not so much. After 44 years of improvising on stage, they finally dedicated a whole album to it. It reminds me more than a little of Jewels (2007), which had a similarly conceptual, improvisational foundation. It suffers the same faults of lacking melody, structure, and dynamics, but it does certainly contain multitudes of mildly unsettling vibes. (It is still Neubauten, after all.) Yet the weird rhythmic spaces that the songs inhabit under Blixa Bargeld’s bemused but subtle social commentary still draw me in. “Gesundbrunnen” appears to be a meditation on gender from a non-binary lens. I apparently caught an early version of “Before I Go” when I saw them at the Konzerthaus in 2022. (The Rampe that they played at the Columbiahalle didn’t make the cut.)
• Khruangbin - A La Sala - This feels like a conscious throwback to the simpler, more open, mostly instrumental, pure vibe-setting style of their early singles and first album (The Universe Smiles Upon You, 2015). I still enjoy the work they’ve done in the meantime, but I was slowly losing interest and worried they would give up on what made them special. This isn’t quite transcendent, but it is quite pleasant and still manages a few subtle surprises.
• Mannequin Pussy - I Got Heaven - The punkiest songs are too aggro for me, but the rest are a superb balance of raw power, careful production, and emotional vulnerability and ambiguity.
• Ride - Interplay - On par with their other reunion-era albums, and full of broadly painted feelings about the pandemic and (presumably British) politics. It’s nonetheless rather upbeat.

And here a few other 2024 releases that I have opinions about:

• Can - Live in Paris 1973 - This circulated as a bootleg for years, and although this official release boasts a better quality than what was previously available, it’s still not exactly high fidelity. It still ends abruptly and prematurely. These five jams are sometimes based on known songs, but it sounds 90% improvised. Damo Suzuki’s words are almost entirely incoherent, but that’s not unusual. It’s cool for hardcore fans, but certainly not for casual listening. They also released a couple live albums from 1977, and while both are pleasantly funky, they don’t reach the same heights.
• The Smile - Wall of Eyes and Cutouts - Very moody, often unsettling, and minimally exciting. The only release comes from the big crashing moment of “Bending Hectic”. Wall of Eyes feels a bit by the numbers for Yorke and Greenwood, and while Cutouts might be slightly better, neither is as good as A Light for Attracting Attention (2022). These albums take the band further away from Radiohead and more into Yorke’s familiar solo territory, albeit with Jonny’s orchestrations and better drumming. I’ve realized that I’m bored of that. I didn’t even bother buying Cutouts after my relative disappointment with Wall of Eyes.

In other news, I finally found an Element of Crime album that I enjoy without restriction: Romantik from 2001. It’s a perfect balance of their best parts (down-to-earth poetic texts, beautiful arrangements of an indeterminate era, Sven Regener’s baritone at its most melodic) with hardly a trace of their early roughness or later predictability. “Alle vier Minuten” is the best ode to the Berliner U-Bahn that I could ever ask for.

2021 in Review

2021 proved to be a perhaps even more challenging year for me than 2020. Music has hardly been my focus lately, and Covid restrictions and anxiety prevented me from seeing many concerts. I had tickets for a twice-rescheduled Jesus & Mary Chain concert, but didn’t go, and after purchasing a ticket for Synästhesie in a fit of summer optimism, I returned it when things turned worse. In the end I only saw few outdoor concerts, most notably the Ich brauche eine Genie songbook release party, and one indoor show of Ian Fisher. I only managed a single other review, although I also released one more song of my own work. I didn’t even listen to music at my normal rate; I bought fewer records than I had in any year since 2002, which is before I had a job, started recording, or could drive myself to a record store.

Nonetheless, I did listen to some music. Here are my favorite releases of 2021:

• Cremant Ding Dong - assorted singles - I’m so thrilled they’ve kept going. Many of their songs are still amusingly pandemic-related, but they’ve branched out, too, as with “Zu faul für’n eigenen Garten” (“Too Lazy for My Own Garden”). They write great lyrics and the cat still appears in every video.
• Falsetto Boy - People Crying in Cars - Falsetto Boy has released a string of singles, EPs, and splits (to say nothing of his excellent releases as Cup Collector, among other projects), but this is his first album under this banner in ten years. It’s a double, and it’s his strongest and most cohesive work yet. The guitars are splendrous and the lyrics and vocals are affecting. He also released “I Can’t Do That Anymore” from a Snappy Little Numbers compilation as a single, which is a little burst of upbeat energy with appropriately downbeat lyrics.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor - G_d’s Pee at State’s End! - Have they released a bad album? No. They haven’t. The general pattern of post-apocalyptic ensemble rock and drone just gets refined with time as the rest of the world catches up to what they’ve been saying for 25+ years.
• Lightning Bug - A Color of the Sky - Hazy dreampop of the best variety. I’d just found their earlier albums at the start of the year before this was even announced, and I couldn’t be happier. They’re all pretty similar, but this one sounds the best. It's got less noisy shoegaze and more wistful synth folk. I think the radio-static compression effect is overdone, but otherwise I love the production.
• Nation of Language - A Way Forward - Their basic technique hasn’t changed since last year's Introduction, Presence, but they continue to churn out great synthpop. The drama has only heightened, though, and this album is actually slightly more upbeat and complex.
• St. Vincent - Daddy’s Home - Still can’t beat Strange Mercy (2011), but I prefer the 70s pastiche to the drug-addled electro mayhem of Masseduction (2017). The gender politics speak to me (or at least amuse me) better, too.
• Stereolab - Electrically Possessed: Switched On Volume 4 - It’s hard to compete with the first two editions of this series, but it’s still a gift that they finally caught up with the missing years. A few tracks feel like insubstantial filler, but most is high-quality, and the wide variety makes for a more captivating listen than any of their latter-day albums from the same era (well, except maybe Margerine Eclipse).

Again, a few additional honorable mentions:

• The Besnard Lakes - Are the Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings - This is such a strange band. I love their grandiose vision, but I have trouble holding on to the individual songs. They went even harder into the long form, including a long closing drone at the end of the album. I’m not sure they used the time wisely. They also released the “Superego” single, which is a little poppier and more direct.
• Kikagaku Moyo - Live at Levitation - I literally heard this band’s KEXP session playing at a tea store and knew I had to hear more. I caught the name and now I’m hooked. There’s a degree to which this sort of deeply psychedelic jamming gets predictable and redundant, but I love it anyway. It was pure coincidence that I hadn’t already caught wind of them via Levitation, and when I found this album, I had to have it.
• Monta at Odds - Peak of Eternal Light - I hyped this Kansas City space rock band’s music last year, too, and it doesn’t seem that I’m gonna stop soon. This album didn’t immediately pull me in the way Argentum Dreams did, but it’s just about as good. Your Friend makes another appearance, too!

And lastly, a couple excellent albums (and a single) from recent years that I missed before but caught up with this year:

• Sharon Van Etten - Are We There (2014) - After hearing her name for years now I finally gave her a proper listen. I get lost in the beauty, power, and finesse of her voice every time regardless of where I’m at. The music is a perfect match, too, even if the lyrics don't always do it for me.
• Hallogallo 2010 - “Blinkgürtel” / “Drone Schlager” (2010) - Two great kosmische songs from a collaboration between Michael Rother of Neu! and Harmonia, Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, and Aaron Mullan. I don’t really know what the history of these tracks was, but it doesn’t matter. They’re on par with the classics.
• TENGGER - Spiritual (2017), Spiritual 2 (2019), and Nomad (2020) - I’d wanted to see them at Synästhesie in 2019, but I missed my chance. I finally dug into their music, and I find their latest three albums utterly entrancing. They are kosmische drones without much of a melody, but I can put them on in the background and always end up feeling better.

Who knows what 2022 will bring. I’m just trying to find some peace and stability. Stay healthy!