A good year for music if nothing else: Jennifer Kelly’s 2024 review
Ben Chasny came to VT in 2024, go figure.
Things have been feeling very end of the world for a few years now, and 2024 (especially from November on) only intensified my sense of doom. It’ll get worse, too, in 2025. The vilest, stupidest people on earth are in change, and oh boy, do they have a lot of ideas, all of them bad.
But you lived through last year, too, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to experience whatever hell 2025 brings. It’s scary shit, but also deeply tedious, so let’s talk about music instead.
Because music came through in a big way this year. There was so much of it, and so much that was great.
Live music, for instance, continued to flourish, even in very small markets like Western Massachusetts and southern Vermont and New Hampshire. Bang, right off the bat, we caught Makaya McCraven in February holding court at Brattleboro’s Vermont Jazz Center. With Junius Paul, Brandee Younger and Marquis Hill, he hit the highlights from 2022’s In these Times, mixing up trad jazz, improvisation and hip hop in an intricate mesh, and it was wonderful.
Makaya McCraven and friends
Now let’s jump ahead to May and the always remarkable Thing in the Spring, where Myriam Gendron (with Jim White and Marisa Anderson), Mark Ribot, Earth and many others visited Keene, NH. Wadada Leo Smith played an astonishing set with Shazad Ismaily…even more astonishing, he had to yell at the crowd for quiet.
I even had the chance to see a couple of bands that rarely play live. In August, my friend Chris Liberato booked the super-ish group Winged Wheel to play at a nondescript bar near Springfield Mass. It was revelatory, worth getting lost trying to find 91 in the middle of the night afterwards.
Winged Wheel
Then in November, right around the time, things started getting dark, I hit the lottery. First Haley Fohr and Bill Nace raised the spirits in Keene, a day later the NYC post-punk legends Love Child with Lupo Citta in Easthampton, and a couple of days after that, Ben Chasney and Tashi Dorji in Brattleboro in front of the towering pipe organ at Epsilon Spires.
Love Child
Tashi Dorji
Recorded music came in an avalanche in 2024, just so many good records, month after month after month. I narrowed my favorites down to a list of 42, harder than you’d think, and there are plenty of discs I enjoyed plenty that didn’t make the cut.
Top Ten
Rosali—Bite Down (Merge) My favorite all year long for Rosali’s lovely voice, the instant classic-ness of the songs and the kicking band in Mowed Sound.
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds—Wild God (PIAS) What I’d really like is another Grinderman, but this lush, string-heavy iteration of the Cave art form is very fine in its own way, not least because it leans on the Bad Seeds more heavily than the last couple. Time for joy indeed.
The Cure—Songs for a Lost World (Polydor) It is not easy to crack my top five in November, but Robert Smith did it with the bleak, soul-stirring grandeur of this late-life epic. It doesn’t hurt that he still sounds exactly like he did in my misspent youth.
Oneida—Expensive Air (Joyful Noise) Oneida has been my favorite working band for decades, and this one follows the song-structured Success with more bangers but also more weirdness. Thalia Zedek sings on two tracks with her signature ragged power.
Miriam Gendron—Mayday (Thrill Jockey) These are just surpassingly beautiful songs about love and death, gorgeously played and sung. Gendron continues to get more comfortable with her art, taking a few more well-worth-it steps from her folk music origins.
PYPY—Sacred Times (Goner) Unhinged post-punk from one of the best in Montreal’s thriving scene. “Lonely Striped Sock” crosses ESG with Delta Five and contains the craziest keyboard lick I’ve heard this year.
MJ Lenderman—Manning Fireworks (ANTI-) One of 2024’s consensus favorites, and for all that, more idiosyncratic and complicated than you’d expect. Genuinely intriguing writing coupled with an incendiary rock roar.
Cassandra Jenkins—My Light My Destroyer (Dead Oceans) A bigger, denser, more accomplished sound for Jenkins than on her magical debut, but no less quirkily intelligent for its beauty.
Mdou Moctar—Funeral for Justice (Matador) Mdou Moctar is maybe the best guitarist in rock music right now, and here’s the kicker, he’s not really in rock music. Searing, wrenching, politically charged Afro-rock from the master.
Another Dancer—I Try to Be Another Dancer (Bruit Direct Disques) This charmingly odd Brussels ensemble skips from detuned Lewsberg-style minimalism to glowing Stereolab raves. Unexpected and intoxicating.
The rest
Winged Wheel—Big Hotel (12XU)
Uranium Club—Infants Under the Bulb (Static Shock)
E—Living Waters (Silver Rocket)
Luppo Citta—S-T (12XU)
Six Organs—Time Is Glass (Drag City)
Des Demonas—Apocalyptic Boom Boom (In the Red)
Guided by Voices—Strut of Kings (GBV Inc.)
Weak Signal—Fine (12XU)
Bonnie “Prince” Billy—Hear the Children/The Evidence (No Quarter)
Yasmin Williams—Acadia (Nonesuch)
Bill Mackay—Locust Land (Drag City)
Hard Quartet—S-T (matador)
The Bug Club—On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System (Sub Pop)
Black Pus—Terrestrial Seethings (Thrill Jockey)
Dummy—Free Energy (Trouble in Mind)
Horse Jumper of Love—Disaster Trick (Run for Cover)
Itasca—Imitation of War (Paradise of Bachelors)
West of Roan—Queen of Eyes (Spinster)
James Elkington & Nathan Salsburg—All Gist (Paradise of Bachelors)
Workers Comp—S-T (Ever/Never)
Jessica Pratt—Here in the Pitch (Mexican Summer)
Aluminum—Fully Beat (felte)
Mary Timony—Untame the Tiger (Merge)
Mount Eerie—Night Palace (P.W. Elverum & Sun)
Penny Arcade—Backwater Collage (Tapete)
Rail Band—S-T (Mississippi)
The Softies—The Bed I Made (Father/Daughter)
Thine Retail Simps—Strike Gold Strike Back Strike Out (Total Punk)
Another Dancer — I Try to Be Another Dancer (Bruit Direct Disques/Aguirre)
Photo by laurens
Another Dancer is a nonsensical carnival, a festival of continual reinvention, a dayglo pinwheel in a world of greys and browns. It is also a band from Brussels, delivering this, its astonishing first album. Another Dancer’s five members are drawn from various arts scenes, not all of them music-based, and its songs are all fucking over the place in the most glorious way possible. When Bee Thousand first came out, I felt that every track could have been made by a different band, but that they fit together like puzzle pieces. I Try to Be Another Dancer elicits the same dazzled, euphoric disorientation. It is not one thing. It is everything. In Technicolor.
You might think, at the opening of this disc, that Another Dancer means to be Another Post-Punk Band. An edgy, off-kilter bass line wobbles across the screen, all serrated edges and angles. And yet, soon it is sheathed in the most ebullient hum. Layered female voices descant through irregularities and syncopations, as frontman Dries Robbe warbles cheerily, a la Half Japanese. “I try to be…Another Dancer,” he intimates. Mission achieved.
“Overfriendly Dogs” bounds and frolics like its canine inspiration, a bass line thundering through synthesizer air castles and drifting female vocals (that’s Margo Mot, a filmmaker before this). When Mot starts a monotone chant wreathed by sonic pleasures, it’s like Dry Cleaning spliced to Stereolab, and very, very good. Then “Time Sense” slips a gear into lo-fi, heart-felt anthemry, like a lost cut from Neutral Milk Hotel or an early stab at GBV’s “Awful Bliss.” A brief palate cleaner, it leads to the squiggly lyricism of “How To, Slow,” another epiphany, so gorgeous it needs no classification. (And just as well, because where would we start?) There are glitch electronics and manipulated voices in Dntel-ish “You Know Where I Start,” but also a wistful, thread of melody. “Take the spaceship to Mars,” Robbe croons, and maybe we’re already there? Then a buzz-saw fuzz guitar busts through “Slow Sports,” a noise bomb amid sweet, yelping sincerity. Another Dancer takes all the left turns, but somehow never ends up where it started.
