There is so much good stuff, I started listing the ones I’m most amped about but there were dozens of them. Dozens! And a new Bjork album to top it off!
https://tenor.com/blGDV.gif
I'm just going to reiterate my position that:
- Bunny is an excellent song and one of this year's best
- There might be... IDK... a dozen (?) equally good or better Caroline/Chairlift tunes?
Basically, I'm happy to see the acclaim for a perpetually underrated artist, but to me its not a qualitative leap forward just a smooth extension of a great body of work
I really like it too. And it feels distinct to this era of TWOD, whereas something like Harmonia is, for me, like a retread of "Holding On" or "Strangest Thing" but not quite as good.
But honestly? Because I like Bunny a lot but as someone who has been riding with Caroline for awhile now there are plenty of better Chairlift and Solochek joints
Oh man, I totally jumped to the list and missed that first paragraph. End of an era! Remember when people used to get so mad just at the existence of this column? Thanks for sticking it out, Chris. It's been a really great addition to Stereogum.
As has become our yearly tradition, Chazpod & I have compiled a meta-list from all the AOTY comments. I feel like you all know how the system works at this point, if not, just ask us about it. It was an interesting year to do this project since there were few obvious front runners and y’all’s lists were truly all over the place, in the best way. But something like a consensus can be found and it looks more or like this:
Top 10
Low - HEY WHAT (94, 33)
Turnstile - GLOW ON (79, 27)
Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee (68, 26)
The War on Drugs - I Don’t Live Here Anymore (57, 22)
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & LSO - Promises (36, 15)
Magdalena Bay - Mercurial World (31, 12)
The Armed - ULTRAPOP (31, 11)
Tyler, the Creator - CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST (30, 16)
The Weather Station - Ignorance (27, 14)
Cassandra Jenkins - An Overview on Phenomenal Nature (26, 12)
11-20
Lingua Ignota - SINNER GET READY (24, 11)
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - Carnage (23, 10)
Deafheaven - Infinite Granite (21, 11)
The World is a Beautiful Place… - Illusory Walls (21, 9)
Dry Cleaning - New Long Leg (21, 8)
For Those I Love - For Those I Love (20, 8)
Nation of Language - A Way Forward (19, 7)
Indigo de Souza - Any Shape You Take (18, 9)
Black Country, New Road - For the First Time (18, 7)
SPELLLING - The Turning Wheel (18, 7)
21-30
Parannoul - To See the Next Part of the Dream (17, 10)
Portrayal of Guilt - CHRISTFUCKER (17, 6)
Fiddlehead - Between the Richness (16, 9)
Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introvert (16, 9)
Hovvdy - True Love (16, 6)
JPEGMAFIA - LP! (16, 6)
Snail Mail - Valentine (15, 6)
Sons of Kemet - Black to the Future (15, 5)
Lucy Dacus - Home Video (14, 9)
Mdou Moctar - Afrique Victime (14, 8)
31-40
Matt Sweeney & Bonnie “Prince” Billy - Superwolves (13, 6)
Spirit of the Beehive - ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH (13, 5)
Arooj Aftab - Vulture Prince (12, 6)
Panopticon - … And Again Into the Light (12, 6)
Mach-Hommy - Pray for Haiti (12, 4)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END (11, 6)
Katy Kirby - Cool Dry Place (11, 5)
Genesis Owusu - Smiling with No Teeth (11, 4)
Squid - Bright Green Field (10, 6)
Iron Maiden - Senjutsu (10, 4)
41-50
Origami Angel - Gami Gang (10, 4)
Wolf Alice - Blue Weekend (10, 3)
Iceage - Seek Shelter (9, 6)
Lightning Bug - A Color of the Sky (9, 5)
Arca - kick ii-iii-iiii-iiiii (9, 5)
Halsey - IF I CAN’T HAVE LOVE, I WANT POWER (9, 4)
Remember Sports - Like a Stone (9, 4)
Kanye West - Donda (9, 4)
Ducks, Ltd. - Modern Fiction (9, 4)
Foxing - Draw Down the Moon (9, 4)
Here’s to another year of commenting & many more!
Kristin sings like she’s been through several circles of hell and I guess this was one of them. So many sickening details but worst of all was reading that she tried to end her own life. Just heartbreaking. Glad she’s still with us.
For the last two album cycles I would've been just another American sleeping on Wolf Alice but they won me over in a big way this time. Blue Weekend seems like some lost classic from the golden age of alt rock. Serious Mellon Collie / Bends type of energy the way it blends art rock sonics and stadium-sized hooks. Hugely cathartic album. The live show absolutely killed too - not the first, second, or third show I went to post-pandemic, but the first one that gave me the full out of body experience where a band comes in and blows your expectations out of the water.
Mixtape-era Weezy was mind-altering for me in college, so count me in too. But mostly what I like about CALL ME is Tyler himself. His progression from edgelord heel to loveable dirtbag auteur is the redemption arc I did not see coming. And after loving IGOR I didn't know how much I wanted a straightforward rap release, but as it turns out, its not that straightforward, and the fruits of Flower Boy and Igor are all over it.
I was going to email you about Listmas today (assuming the list would drop tomorrow) but I was up at 8 trying to figure out if my booster shot appointment was canceled or not and there it was in all its glory. Also I did get boosted!
Glad to be stanning effectively where it counts! Daddy's Home, IMO, doesn't really work conceptually, but mostly does at the song level, especially in the back half ("My Baby Wants a Baby" was the one I couldn't stop listening to). The Nowhere Inn was at least watchable ... until it wasn't? Felt like something that should've been an extra on a live DVD. Not sure what possessed them to push it as a feature film.
There were some snubs & low-balls along the way but I was not expecting to see "Bunny is a Rider" at the top and honestly I forgave everything at that moment
RJ has me on the record whining about it below, but by the end of 2021 I was kind of happy about the lack of zeitgeist-crushing instant-classic type records in the Kendrick/Frank/Fiona mode. Just feels like it frees you to listen to whatever you're vibing with and not worry so much about covering the bases.
Any album that inspired the "Cocteau Triplet trance rap" pun has to be worth hearing, so I'm going to have to check it out as well. Also its called Bahamut Zero!
I've never loved TWOD as much as most Gummers do, but I've never not liked one of their albums either, and IDLHA doesn't break the streak. But I definitely enjoyed the last two a lot more. The title track is transcendently good, and I think it shows you what TWOD was going for, but on the other hand, dialing down the psych/space rock/etc aspect means these sort of heartland rock tropes have to carry a lot of weight in the songwriting department and it doesn't always work for me. Like I get we've been comparing Adam to Bruce for a decade now but maybe it has gone a little too far?
Low may in hindsight turn out to be under ranked on my list. It was definitely the album that bowled me over the most on first listen. This was my notes app blurb:
Grandly decaying hymns for the post-post-apocalypse. If Double Negative was the midnight vigil, Hey What sounds like the first signs of sunrise over an ashen world, hopeful, in a sense, while also illuminating the staggering extent of the wreckage.
The Armed absolutely checks the next-level-shit box like four our fives times over. It was an HM for me and landed just outside the top 10 (not that they are *that* similar, but Turnstile coming up with a kitchen-sink-hardcore album I liked even more didn't help them stay in rotation either). Also, I have a sneaking feeling I'm going to regret snubbing Mag Bay in a few months, buts its okay, I'm happy to eat my words if it keeps growing on me.
Iceage talking point: it's their I Don't Live Here Anymore, except its better than I Don't Live Here Anymore. Let's talk about it!
2021: weird energy! Less outright terror, more ambient dread, but then there were also these necessary and joyous reunions with friends and family, a resumption of at least some of the old routines and pleasures of city life, not least of all live music. After getting vaccinated I tried, not unsuccessfully, to manifest a new beginning by moving to a new neighborhood. I went to a music festival, to clubs, to the gym, to the beach, started commuting to teach in person again - all the habits of life where music slots in to color and enliven.
As I tried to will a reset that still hasn’t entirely taken, my listening gravitated toward a comfort zone of pop-inflected rock and rock-inflected pop, often driven by women singer-songwriters. Records in that mold make up more than half of my Top 10 (including my three favorites) and many of the runners-up. This has often been my personal soundtrack, and though I dabbled in plenty of more exploratory offerings, it’s largely what stuck, maybe reflecting a calendar with few obvious game-changers, but also fitting for a year where I was more concerned with reassembling my consciousness than rearranging it.
Whatever you listened to, I hope it helped you to hold on to what needed holding and to move forward when you were ready to move. This is what I had on for most of the year:
01. Wolf Alice - Blue Weekend
02. Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee
03. Snail Mail - Valentine
04. Turnstile - GLOW ON
05. Tyler, the Creator - CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST
06. St. Vincent - Daddy's Home
07. Iceage - Seek Shelter
08. Low - HEY WHAT
09. The Weather Station - Ignorance
10. Indigo De Souza - Any Shape You Take
Have some blurbs that I jotted down in notes on the way home from Thanksgiving but lets just see how this comments section is shaping up before I go full TNOCS.
A few weeks ago I was getting my haircut and the barber was listening to Bryan Adams. He started telling the owner that Bryan Adams was one his favorite singers and the owner countered that Bryan Adams was his *favorite* singer, period. Both of these guys are Lebanese with fairly thick accents if that helps you set the scene. Anyway the owner then added that he sometimes got Bryan Adams confused with this other singer, someone he couldn’t think of whose didn’t *always* sound like Bryan Adams but sometimes did. I suggested he was thinking of Rod Stewart and he was like “yes, that’s it!” Then the guy cutting my hair added something so stupid the whole room froze: “and also Sting.” I was definitely like … ???? … but before I could say anything the owner jumped in with “No. Sting sounds completely different. Completely different.” Kinda surprised he didn’t get fired right there.
You have to be as captivating a singer/songwriter/storyteller as Frank to make that sound work, which excludes basically everyone else who has tried it.
Gatekeeping is always annoying but when the thing behind the gate is a song with 421 million Spotify streams, one that has been ripped off, covered, sampled and soundtracked more times than anyone could count, you really do have to wonder what the point is.
And yeah she sounded great as always.
The singles are all hits, for sure. Mag Bay citing Art Angels, Vroom Vroom, and Moth as sacred texts may have set the bar too high - that's not just "for me" its like grossly pandering to me. I don't think they're on that level yet, but they could get there, and that's exciting enough for a debut LP.
I need to put in Xenia’s record, I liked the singles but haven’t taken the dive yet. Tirzah was a miss for me which was disappointing bc I think she’s doing some cool shit. Lots of good stuff to explore here though, thanks!
Yeah the raves from various Gummers in the mid year list piqued my interest. It’s clearly a special record, just a mismatch, for me personally, between the tools the artist uses and the desired effect. Or maybe it’s not that deep and I’ve just never been that into talk-y music.
This is another like-not-love situation. I'm definitely watching where this band goes, but multiple times I've put on the album and double-taked bc I thought I had the same song on repeat.
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