“As I explored Gilpin’s poem with friends and strangers, it’s been no surprise that ‘Two-Headed Calf’ seems well-known in both rural and trans communities and their significant cross-section. And why not? It’s a poem about a creature too beautiful for this world, [whose] magisterial dimorphism and tragic death conjures real-world magic. Someone born feeling as if they have no gender, two genders, the wrong gender, might feel this magic themselves. So would someone who’s pulled an ailing calf from the womb of their beloved milk cow with a rope or their bare hands.”
Perhaps the most memorable year for music in my adult life, even!
You probably saw a headline that more music came out daily in 2024, than was released in the entire YEAR of 1989. If you didn't keep up with it, I hope you'll enjoy some assorted thoughts and brief reviews of my Top 4, with much shorter blurbs about other releases I thought were excellent.
Albums of the Year
Charli XCX - BRAT
Genre: EDM, with a heavy slant towards pop music
For fans of: 100 gecs, Kim Petras
Now plenty has been said about Charli XCX this year, along with Chappel Roan and Sabrina Carpenter she's been brat-ing all over the place from Times Square to, probably, your TikTok feed. (This album has been so impactful, it's christened both a season, BRAT summer, as well as a color, BRAT green.) I've been a fan since 2017, with her instant-classic mixtape Pop 2. To me, Charli's always belonged to the underground world of hyperpop, at least until the genre blew up after Covid and suddenly she's on the main stage at Coachella in 2023.
Charli had a lot of early hits, and then, nothing. A total flop, which for a lot of artists spells the end of a career. But not Charli, instead of giving up or trying the same old formula that wasn't working, she innovated and did something completely new. She followed up her mixtape with How I'm Feeling Now, made up of these pulsing synths, crushed percussion and looped, sped up vocals. 4 years on it's still considered one of the great albums of her genre.
Her 2022 album Crash veered towards the mainstream and, by all accounts, played it safe. And as a result, it wasn't memorable, it failed to live up to her fan's expectations. It flopped. But her evolution continued. That's what makes BRAT so special, it took huge swings and really connected! Great art is deliberate, it takes tremendous work but also tremendous vulnerability.
Even on slower moments she's really bearing her soul, like on "I think about it all the time", where she's thinking about whether or not she wants kids, or "So I", which is a moving tribute to her friend and collaborator SOPHIE who is also dearly missed by many of us listeners.
The promotion of the album is also a lesson in viral marketing, the simple design of the cover was iconic, they even changed the other album covers to promote it! Her Boiler Room set is iconic and showed she's not just singing the songs, she made them. The Year of the Brat culminated in the SWEAT tour with Troye Sivan, which I went to! The show felt like the biggest, queerest nightclub I've ever seen, everyone decked out head-to-toe in BRAT green. And the showmanship was next-level, with a gigantic obelisk dropping down to reveal her at the start.
When I was walking out of the venue and heard the street drummers, it all felt like a high school pep rally, significantly more poppers, though.
A better reviewer than me asked: How many times does Charli XCX have to split an atom before we can just admit that she is the greatest working pop star? The utter dominance of BRAT suggests the time is now, but who knows where Charli will go from here?
If you liked this album, you should check out: Turn Off the Lights by Kim Petras, OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES by Sophie or Silent Shout by The Knife
Ana Lua Caiano - Vou Ficar neste Quadrado
Genre: Glitch pop, with roots in Portuguese folk music
Now for my American audience, stay with me, there's gonna be albums that aren't in English on here. I know that's scary, but we'll hold hands and get through it together, and there's some really good music on the other end of it all. I'll even translate the titles for you, this album is called "I'll Stay In This Square".
In her debut album, Ana Lua Caiano has a singular sound. Looping harmonies unfold over waves of chopped audio and percussion reminiscent of video games off of badly-scratched CDs. Just the texture of some of the instrumentation is a delight to the ear, like the clipping snares on "Os Meus Sapatos Não Tocam Nos Teus" (My Shoes Don't Touch Yours) the clicks on "Cansada" (Tired) or the double-tap of what sounds like a car locking on "Deixem O Morto Morrer" (Let the Dead Die). In her music videos, she also features traditional clothing, dances and culture from her country.
She often takes the harmonies in a monotone, sticking on a single, repeating note to emphasize the melody. It's certainly not the standard third or fifth we hear in new releases, and it's another way this album is different. Also noteworthy, the interludes are kept to a minimum, and where we find them in the album they fit well within the context of the tracklist. The opening "Em Direção Ao Sul" (In the Direction of the Sun), features her humming over static and muffled conversations, and it's a solid foreshadowing of the sound to come.
There's many admirable aspects of Portuguese culture, such as their devotion to family, leisure & tradition. The Portuguese have been through hard times, including a brutal dictatorship that didn't end until 1974. It was a time where people were disappeared for speaking out against the government, and women had very few rights. For those who've visited or have family in Portugal, it's a fact of life that nothing changes quickly there.
Ana Lua Caiano is a young person in this society facing her culture's history, along with the judgement of others & the expectations young women continue to face in 2024. These form the box she's referring to in the title, the one she's decided to stay in, at least for now. She is grappling with wanting to uphold and respect old traditions, while also wanting to make music that's innovative and new. On the second point, she succeeds tremendously with her debut album.
In this stunning debut where old meets new, we find a hypnotic alchemy, something both new & special. And with only running 27 minutes, you have time to listen to it.
Willi Carlisle - Critterland
Genres: Americana, Singer-songwriter & a very long poem about being an outlaw
Hey, thanks for letting me talk about some non-English music. As a treat, let's discuss some good ol' Americana, Willi Carlisle's latest. There's been an encouraging trend in recent years of bluegrass' reclamation by progressive populism. The days of red solo cups & sexy tractors are waning, it's about damn time. Critterland is an earnest defense of what it actually means to be country: love of family, love of others, and the need to link arms as a community in hard times.
"Dry County Dust" talks about how he remembers his mom, and how he considers her death alongside his own near-death experiences. "The Great Depression" pays homage to the resilient spirit of Americans in the 1920's, and the many rights that were won by everyday people banding together. Two-Headed lamb moved me in a particular way, a song about the beauty of being 'born wrong', of having a life that is brief, but also beautiful and unique. He's confirmed this is a song written for the transgender people in his life, and almost immediately I had to add it to my playlist of songs that always make me cry.
The live show was also an emotional experience, full of comfort and warmth and a whole scrolling story of the Two-Headed Lamb. And Willi plays a damn good concertina.
And the music is full of lilting banjos, wailing fiddles and an assorted tableau of harmonicas, steel guitars and more. The choruses are earworms, and if you're not careful you'll find yourself yelling out "Take me to Critterland!" on the title track, or "Higher lonesome, kill the bitter parts of me," later on in the album. Great folk music does this, it makes music that's easy to remember.
In many ways it's anthemic for millennials, particularly "The Arrangements", which recounts his estrangement from his father, and how his feelings are complicated upon his death. Or "I Want No Children", which is the position of many now in our 30's. Especially "When the Pills Wear Off", a heartbreaking tribute to the friends he lost to addiction. And many of us millennials have lost friends to drugs, or are estranged from the family. Many of us feel tremendous pressure to have kids, but either don't want to give up our freedom or can't afford to raise them in an increasingly unequal economy. In just being himself, Willi Carlisle has made an album that encapsulates so many of our generational experiences.
Something else this album does that I just adore, is that it continues on the proud tradition of folk music to tell a good story. Specifically, on "The Money Grows on Trees", which is about a hippie-turned-criminal-mastermind, and his ensuing rise and fall alongisde a corrupt sheriff. At 7 minutes long it is a poem of epic lengths, interspersed with the repeated hymn of "Oh hippies, hillbillies won't you gather round, a good man murdered, a bad man drowned. The cops are all moonshiners now, but the money grows on trees, yeah, the money grows on trees". It reminds me of Johnny Cash's "Send a Picture of Mother" or Brad Paisley & Allison Krauss' song "Whiskey Lullaby". They're all horribly sad songs, but isn't the function of great art to make us feel?
More than just being a damn good album of music, Critterland marks a triumphant return to the true roots of country music. Before 2001, country music was famous for hating the government. Consider Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, the aforementioned Johnny Cash and more. But after 9/11, suddenly all the country singers love the government and are gonna put a boot up your ass if you disagree. But no longer is that the blueprint, guys like Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers and now Willi Carlisle have shown that rural people don't fit neatly into any mold or stereotype.
Tyler, The Creator - Chromakopia
Genres: Hip-hop, a whole lot more R&B than expected
Like many millennials, I've grown up with Tyler, The Creator. I was 17 when "Goblin" came out, and he was this loud, confrontational guy who was mainly here to shock people. His lyrics were smart, but they were also suuuuuuuuuuuper vulgar, and as a newly-rowdy teen escaping a conservative family, I was all about it. I spent a lot of time in 2012 walking around my small-town college campus with "Her" blasting in the headphones, hating my douchebag neighbors & my somehow-required-even-for-humanities geology class.
But then, at some point leading up to 2017, Tyler grew up. Suddenly he's detonating bombs onto the radio with singles like "See You Again" or his iconic "New Magic Wand". This is Tyler in his late 20's and he's mostly done with the shock jock persona and, by his own admission, trying to really get people to take him seriously as a musician. And he really succeeds! Flower Boy gets him nominated for a Grammy, and IGOR wins him his first.
If I had any criticism for Call Me If You Get Lost, it's that the album, for all it's hits, didn't feel cohesive the way IGOR did. But he's back with this release, it may even be his most cohesive work yet. Just for one example, look at the reprise from "St. Chroma" on the closing track. What really sticks out to me on CHROMAKOPIA is that he's talking about the things people my age (EARLY 30's, for the record) are often thinking/worrying about. Specifically, the question of whether or not to have kids. Millennial musicians in general are talking about it a lot in 2024, look at Charli XCX's "I think about it all the time". Tyler takes a few swings at it, on "Hey Jane" and the gorgeously-arranged "Tomorrow".
Often, as young people, we know that our lives are finite, but it's not until we've lived a few decades that we begin to understand the extent to which our days are numbered. We realize we only have so much time to make certain decisions. This is why psychologists like Erik Erikson, who break a lifetime into different developmental stages, identify this time in life as a stage known as intimacy vs isolation. Can we share our lives with someone? Can we go on to share our lives with children, who we must take care of and make sacrifices for? Tyler's really tapped into this struggle, I found it relatable!
The backing tracks really groove throughout, especially on tracks like "Judge Judy" or "I Hope You Find Your Way Home". I'm thrilled to hear Tyler singing entire songs. I think it's criminal it took so long for that to be a key feature on his albums, he's a truly talented vocalist. It really feel like he's found his footing between making deeply personal hip-hop & punchy pop hits. Tyler makes great choices on features for this album, especially Daniel Ceasar who shines on "St. Chroma", and Doechii who kills on "Balloon". But look at the credits and the production team is a whole sky of stars: Steve Lacy, Donald Glover, WILLOW, Solange and more. Tyler should get a lot of credit not just for the musician he's matured into, but the producer he's become. He makes really deliberate choices with samples, on "Noid" it's an obscure Zambian psych rock song. Whereas on "Darling, I" he grabs the snaps off of Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot". Even the whistling into a full brass band on "Sticky" is a deliberate decision, a reference and a gift to HBCU marching bands, who have wasted no time in covering the song.
Tyler ultimately ascends to something higher in "Like Him", where he confronts his ambivalence around fatherhood. He grew up never knowing his father, and it gave him a lot of grief that he expressed in his music from the beginning. how he still sees himself in that idea. Add this all to his mom's voice featuring all over the album, he's really centering his thoughts about family in our modern times.
So what's the final takeaway on CHROMAKOPIA? Life is uncertain, and stressful, but we have to try and be present for as much of it as we can. We need to feel the whole spectrum of human emotion, the pain with the joy, because otherwise a life is missing many colors.
Honorable Mentions - Blurbs
Geordie Greep - The New Sound
Genres: Progressive Rock, with heavy notes of Jazz & Latin (including one of my personal favorites, Samba.)
When Black Midi split earlier this year, it was a sad time for many of us music nerds. But one of the best things to come from it is frontman Geordie Greep's solo debut, which is a delightful mix of jazz rock, avant-prog & features the lead single "Holy, Holy" about a guy who, on the surface, is effortlessly cool but is deeply insecure and paying a woman to have sex with him in a specific way. The term 'tour-de-force' is wildly overused, so I won't promulgate it further, but it's a lot of fun and worth checking out.
Beth Gibbons - Lives Outgrown
Genres: Chamber folk, of a notably psychedelic nature & at least 3 other subgenres
The former Portishead frontwoman has been away from the spotlight for a while now, her last album was in 2002. Lives Outgrown is similarly a chamber folk album, but it's full of delightful moments. I particularly enjoyed the plucking bass line in "Floating On a Moment" and her confrontation of mortality & love on "Lost Changes". All the songwriting that made Portishead great is present on this record, and I hope Beth Gibbons will be on the festival lineups next year here in the US.
Doechii - Alligator Bites Never Heal
Genres: Good ol' fashioned Hip-Hop, for your inner or outer diva
Doechii is yet another TikTok rapper who made it into the mainstream. But her talent has been undeniable for a long time now, and it's so refreshing to see her finally get the attention and accolades she deserves. There's plenty of great singles off of this album, including "NISSAN ULTIMA" is a song that makes me wonder, "who is this DIVA??" Otherwise there's "BOILED PEANUTS" or "DENIAL IS A RIVER", where she gives herself therapy and absolutely kills on some rhythmic breathing exercises mid-song. It's tremendous fun, and the album has next to 0 features, a crazy bold move in today's music industry, especially for a debut!
Liniker - CAJU
Genres: R&B, but it's from Brazil, and also really good
Liniker, formerly of Os Caramellows, shot to international fame after winning a Latin Grammy for her first album, Indigo Borboleta Anil. In some ways, CAJU is a continuation of the ideas she developed there, but there's a lot more intentionality in the production here. There's a sweet sentimentality to the songs on this record. Who doesn't love a love song, or one about longing? Brazilians are excellent writers when it comes to both topics (This is the home of Nara Leao, or Milton Nascimento, after all). Yes, it's another one of those scary, non-English albums, but perhaps you could jump in and see how the sounds make you feel?
Joey Valance & Brae - No Hands
Genres: Old-school hip-hop, a little Nerdcore, but a Nerdcore that is fun at parties & knows how to talk to girls
It's well-written, it's funny, it's taking the genre seriously as the duo has grown up and is getting away from being gimmicky rappers from TikTok. The stand-out to me is "OMNITRIX" which is dripping with confidence & humor, and it's also a song about how they don't wanna be underestimated and, much like Ben 10's Omnitrix, there's lots of things they can do. They're a real force for positive masculinity in hip-hop, so check it out!
Kendrick Lamar - GNX
Genres: West-coast hip-hop, music for guys who went to therapy and came back angrier
Kendrick has had a crazy year, his feud with Drake has been in the pop culture spotlight as countless publications declare "Not Like Us" to be Song of the Year. That was the highlight of the beef for many, but I always liked "Meet the Grahams" more. They say that to be loved is to be seen, and I think that's true. But sometimes, to be truly, deeply hated is to be seen, and Kendrick read Aubrey like a book. GNX doesn't quite reach the heights of some of his past releases, perhaps not even Mr. Morale, but it's a solid album. Kendrick is like pizza, I'm never gonna be mad when I see it's available. The "tv off" yell of MUSTAAAAAAAAAARD will probably live on for a while, and I adored the Luther sample as well, I hope he & SZA burn down those stadiums on next year's tour.
Jared's Top Ten Albums of 2024! 1. Willi Carlisle - Critterland
Well, here we are, my number one album of 2024, and it's been a journey with Critterland. Albums like Brat and Absolute Elsewhere were love at first listen. Critterland, on the other hand was a massive grower. On first listen, I found it lacking in hooks, and perhaps a little too dramatic. And yet, I returned again and again to it's Amusement park of homespun tragedies and sad tales. With Carlisle always beckoning for me to return to his world of drugs, death, and familial struggle.
Carlisle is an artist that I hadn't even heard of prior to Critterland receiving buzz all the way back in January of 2024, but this is his third album, and clearly he has polished his sound to perfection. He's an old fashioned songsmith, the "four chords and the truth" brand of country music is on full display. And yet, it's also not quite like any country album I've heard before. Carlisle has a certain dramatic quality to his voice, perhaps even theatrical. When he inhabits a character, he transforms. He embodies the stories, no matter how true they actually are, they all feel intensely, viscerally REAL. How strained is Willi's relationship with his father? One listen to "The Arrangements" will have you convinced that the tension is like razor wire. Is "Jaybird" about a real close friend lost to mental illness? I certainly believe Carlisle when he sings about him. And I certainly feel the palpable loss that runs through all of "When the Pills Wear Off," an ode to a lover lost to a drug overdose. Again, I don't really know how true these tales are, and I don't really want to pry too much. What matters most is that Carlisle is able to make them FEEL real, with nothing more than some guitar strumming, banjo picking, harmonica, and his delivery.
There are catchy melodies and tunes throughout, usually in WIlli's vocal melody, but they're not as immediate as one would expect. Still, I find myself thinking of the melodies from the title track, or "Higher Lonesome" often, and in turn, I go and listen to them. Which may sound like it's a bit depressing, and I suppose it is, but I find the album too compelling in it's storytelling for it to truly feel draining. Perhaps the best evidence of that is the closing track, "The Money Grows on Trees," a 7 and a half minute, mostly spoken word poetry recitation about a man growing marijuana in the countryside. A monologue over seven minutes with a sung chorus should be an album killer, at least for me. And yet, I love it. The writing is captivating, and Carlisle's delivery even more so. It's absolutely arresting, and manages to be one of my favorite songs of the year, in spite of it's downright non-songness. And this one, I'm relatively certain is fiction, and he sells it just as well as the ones I'm not so sure about.
In many ways, Critterland feels a bit like a one man show one might see way off Broadway (both New York's and Nashville's). The songs feel like a cohesive vision of the trials and tribulations of growing up, living, and dying as an outsider in small town USA. It's a show that you'll definitely want tickets to. I'll be in the front row, that's for certain.
Not gonna lie, I love Willi Carlisle, but was skeptical of a 7-minute long spoken word ballad (with a sung refrain). But this piece is badass.
The live version was better, though. (All of Willi's songs are better live.)
