BEST ALBUMS OF 2019 (#20-11)
MAGDALENE finds twigs grappling with the scrutiny of fame in a time of personal crisis; a health scare that overlapped with a devastating breakup, so devastating that here she casts her pain as being biblical. If that sounds pretentious, don’t worry- twigs’s music has never been so endearing or so palpably personal. She explodes the breakup album and launches it into space, embracing classical song structure just so she can rip it apart, getting to the heart of the medium’s panoramic possibilities for personal exploration, exposing herself more thoroughly than she ever has in the process.
19. BRANDON BANKS, Maxo Kream
Maxo Kream’s father looms large on Brandon Banks. “Brandon Banks” is an alias he used when scamming. That’s his face on the left side of the album cover, crudely taped over Maxo’s own, but if you just glance at it you might not notice they’re two different people, their faces morphing into one another’s like a still from Persona. That’s the idea. Maxo digs deep into the family history that drove him to the streets with stunning clarity, an inheritance of criminal activity, violence, and despair, but also valuable life lessons and a hard-earned resilience- the kind of lessons that would compel you to tell your father you love him after you beat his ass.
18. THE PRACTICE OF LOVE, Jenny Hval
Jenny Hval’s music has become increasingly more accessible over the years, bending ever so slightly towards something you might call pop, if you caught it at the right angle. But this isn’t to say that she’s compromised her identity as an artist at all. If anything, her music’s become deeper, more nuanced, and more affecting. The entrancing, repetitive rhythms and uncanny interpolation of spoken word in The Practice of Love transcend the borders of genre, offering mystic observations on the concept of love itself that you can lose yourself in.
17. ANGEL’S PULSE, Blood Orange
Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes has a habit compiling cutting room scraps and leftover ideas into a sort of epilogue for whatever album he’s just put out. Just as much thought and effort goes into these follow ups, but he holds them close, only sharing them with dear friends and collaborators, if anyone at all. Judging by the quality of Angel’s Pulse, the first of these projects to receive a proper release, it’s a shame we’ve never heard any of them before. These songs don’t sound like throw aways, but rather compliments to the soundscape of Negro Swan, a handful of them even eclipsing that album’s peaks, revealing new, strange corners of Hynes’s sound.
If UFOF sounds like it was beamed in from some other realm, Two Hands sounds like it sprang up from the soil. It’s Big Thief at their rawest, up close and personal like the tight framing of the cover art, yet their images of violence, insecurity, grief, what have you, are obfuscated, buried in the dirt just out of sight. But that’s where their power derives from; the attempt to decipher them. Like a feeling, their songs are thrillingly difficult to pin down and are uniformly compelling.
15. ITEKOMA HITS, Otoboke Beaver
The spirit of punk is alive and well in Japan. Otoboke Beaver’s blistering Itekoma Hits is a lightning speed study in well placed rage and controlled chaos that reminds the listener that a good punk album is a living thing, bending unexpectedly to accommodate the enormity of feeling on display. A song’s established rhythm will stop suddenly so the guitars and drums can punctuate an exclamation in perfect unison with lead vocalist Accorinrin’s words, before the song devolves into a rumbling, discordant mess that’s rousing as hell. The result is a towering, playful epic in miniature that’s too big to be contained.
The visual companion to ANIMA sees Thom Yorke struggle dancing through a nightmare dystopian society, like The Trial as directed by Pina Bausch. The drably dressed dancers are lost in a dizzying monotony, reflected in the pulsing, repetitive synth beats that define the album, and just when it seems Yorke’s broken free and found intimacy and genuine human connection, we find him right where he started, dozing off on public transit, trapped in the prison of routine. It makes sense that Yorke would explore many of the same textures and instrumentation of his score for Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, recycling the cinematic strings and sinister synths to paint a restless widescreen portrait of despair on societal and personal levels.
CHAI’s music is charming and carefree, relishing in the joy and simple power of statements like “everybody’s special guys!” “you and me always! how fun!” or “love! love is all that we want!” Looking at the translated lyric sheet, it’s remarkable how many times whoever translated it felt compelled to use exclamation points. The album plays like one extended, 30-minute-long exclamation point. But this is not simple, straightforward pop. The textures are stunningly complex, utilizing competing rhythms, discordant tones, and distortion to build sonic worlds you can dig deep into. Everything about the album is maximalist in the best way, announcing CHAI to the world as uncompromising, terminally delightful purveyors of high pop.
12. LET THE SUN TALK, MAVI
“So she saying what kind of music you make? The kind you gotta read, baby.” MAVI’s not lying. He’s described his raps as “equations,” which is a uniquely apt descriptor. You could build a semester seminar around unpacking the dense poetry of Let The Sun Talk’s brief 30-minute run time, but MAVI spits the words out effortlessly atop meandering beats sculpted from hypnotically looped, refracted samples, announcing to the world what he already knows: he’s among the very best in the game.
The image of Cate Le Bon descending an otherworldly mountainside, casually defying gravity in an editorial look that could grace magazine covers feels uniquely suited to her songwriting. On Reward, her music is extra-terrestrial. Woozy, distorted horns and guitars and buzzing synths provide the foundation while Cate’s singularly striking voice and surreal lyrics that can verge on comedy drive it home, deepening and expanding her sound to craft her best effort yet.
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