Jennifer Kelly 2020: I’m done expecting next year to be better
Not to belabor the point, which has been covered everywhere, but 2020 sucked. My last live concert was on March 7th. It was 75 Dollar Bill in a beautiful reconfigured industrial space on the Amherst College campus, and I already had questions about whether I should be there or not. The show was worth it, absolutely riveting, and no one I know got sick from it, but a couple of weeks later, Amherst College shut down and then, basically, the world.
When I think about 2020, I think about bands that don’t fully make sense unless you see them live, and how, this year, no one got to see them live. I think about musicians who were barely making it before, now cut off from concert revenues and, in a lot of cases, day jobs at restaurants, coffee shops and bars. I think about six-digit medical bills from multi-week COVID-19 treatments, and how my insurance will only cut that to low five figures. I think about the constant spew of bile and nonsense, the willful destruction of American institutions and the persistent sense that we will never recover from any of this, and I look for refuge.
Most of the time in music. Because the music kept coming even when everything else shut down. Even the artists who were holding back for better conditions ended up releasing EVERY ALBUM ON EARTH starting about September 18th. There was always music, good music, interesting music, beautiful music, and while that doesn’t compensate for a terrible year, it was something.
Here are 10 albums I loved best from 2020, with links to reviews or other articles I’ve written about them.
1. Gunn-Truscinski — Soundkeeper (Three Lobed)
Soundkeeper by Gunn-Truscinski Duo
A gorgeous exploration of mood and tone, this double CD set includes two extended live cuts and ten more recorded just down the road in Easthampton, Massachusetts. (And I thought nothing ever happened up here.) “Pyramid Merchandise” punches the hardest, John Truscinski balancing rock solid beat keeping with abstracted sculptures of percussive experiment, while Gunn finds the sweetness and the growl in his blues-touched guitar sound. But “Ocean City” is pure lovely respite, with big rounded notes dropping slowly and with grace through wavering transparencies of sustained tone. Long, searching, “Soundkeeper” will rekindle your longing for live improvised music, while the closer “For Eddie Hazel” vibrates with supercharged intensity, the notes and the steady rhythm too bright and beautiful to look at straight on.
2. Six Organs of Admittance — Companion Rises (Drag City)
Companion Rises by Six Organs of Admittance
Chasny imbues the down-home with wonder and the inexplicable with natural grace in this album inspired by stargazing. The album’s name references the way Sirius appears close to Orion, and the rollicking “The Scout Is Here,” commemorates the appearance of the Oumuamua asteroid, but this is no squiggle-y space opera. The music is mainly made of clean, all-natural picking, blues bends, and rambling jangle, though ruptured, periodically, by rushing, whooshing, amplified electronic sounds. Warm, simple clarity is tipped with awe in finger-picked “Black Tea,” while mists and mysteries predominate in evanescent “Worn Down to the Light,” but the joy comes in the balance between the ordinary and the unknowable shimmering like stars in a black sky.
3. Gil Scott-Heron and Makaya McCraven — We’re New Again (XL Recordings)
When the estate of Gil Scott-Heron asked Chicago composer, percussionist and hip hop chopper Makaya McCraven to reimagine the artist’s last, most personal album, McCraven jumped at the chance to tackle its themes of black struggle, black family and perseverance. McCraven surrounded Scott-Heron’s words with shimmering, post-jazz arrangements that incorporated some of his father’s recordings (his dad is jazz drummer Stephen McCraven) in an ongoing tribute to the blood relatives who shape and equip young black men for a challenging world. The music is wonderful, very different from the original, spare, blues-based arrangements, but they open out the master’s words in an illuminating way. I like, especially, the hustling, shuffling movement of “New York Is Killing Me,” which summons the city’s energy as clearly as the feel of heat rising out of a subway grate in August.
4. Obnox — Savage Raygun (Ever/Never)
Savage Raygun by Obnox
Obnox’s psychedelic mayhem roars like a California wildfire, setting a torch to rock, soul, hip hop, jazz and punk with fuzz-crusted abandon. Icons like Hawkwind flare out and curl into white-hot ash, while even Neil Young’s lick from “Southern Man,” is consumed in the all-encompassing heat of Lamont Thomas’ onslaught (“Young Neezy”). A double album, Savage Raygun covers a lot of ground, but in such a kinetic rush that it seems like one entity that stretched from end to end.
5. Anjimile — Giver Taker (Father/Daughter)
Giver Taker by Anjimile
Anjimile sounds beautifully comfortable with their new vocal range in this second full-length, which follows a gender transition. Pitched low and warm, their voice effortlessly navigates subtle melodies, integrating complex, African-leaning rhythms into songs about love, identify, family friction and the possibility of redemption through embracing one’s authentic self.
6. Osees — Protean Threat (Castleface)
Protean Threat by Oh Sees
John Dwyer has fronted bands called The O.Cs., The Ohsees, Thee Ohsees and now just Osees, evolving from a one-man bedroom pop outfit to a gleefully slopping garage pop project to a droning, krautrocking motoric monster along the way. This newest iteration takes a little of this, a little of that, from the repertoire, putting Dwyer’s best Bo Diddley-esque stomper in years (“If I Had My Way”) next to a wiggy psychedelic freak bomb called “Toadstool” which is adjacent to the dub-scented, narcotic head trip called “Gong of Catastrophe.” The mix works because Dwyer and his band commit to all of it, sequentially and within tracks. It’s the best Osees in years, all the good things in one package.
7. Sam Amidon — S-T (Nonesuch)
As always, Amidon starts with traditional, mostly folk and blues material and, as always, he transforms it into something more adventurous, spiritual and faintly otherworldly. With Shahzad Ismaily and Antibalas’ Chris Vatalaro to back him up, he breaks down the unyielding contours of pre-modern banjo tunes and porch blues, finding steady drones and complex afro-beat syncopations in their steady melodies. You can hear “Cuckoo Bird” a million times in a million different voices and never hear it as luminous and open-ended as here.
8. James Elkington — Ever Roving Eye (Paradise of Bachelors)
James Elkington is always pressed for time, maybe because he works regularly for so many other people’s bands (Richard Thompson, Jeff Tweedy, Spencer Tweedy) and collaborates with others (Steve Gunn). And yet his second solo album brims with balm and solace; he finds time in the interstices between warm, jazz-scented, Pentangle-esque verses and intricate flurries of picked and strummed and electric guitar. Even “Nowhere Time,” which exhorts “It is time for you to move,” has an ease and calm to it, while “Moon Tempering” is as still and lovely as winter starlight. Ever-Roving Eye is an album that assures us we’ll get it all done somehow, but just stop for a minute and listen.
9. Jehnny Beth — To Love Is To Live (Arts & Crafts)
This riveting solo debut from the Savages frontperson is both quieter and more intense than her full-band compositions, juxtaposing incendiary spoken word with the hedonistic thump of the dance floor. Guests are varied—Joe Talbot of IDLES at one pole, the actor Cillian Murphy at the other—but the music never drifts from Jehnny Beth’s singular viewpoint. Compare her to PJ Harvey or Beth Gibbons or Bobby Gillespie as you will (I did), but this is her 100%, and there’s nothing else like it.
10. Cable Ties — Far Enough (Merge)
Far Enough by Cable Ties
Australia churns out quality punk bands like the Hershey factory makes kisses, and Cable Ties, formed in Melbourne by four young rebels, ranks as one of the best to surface here in America this year. “Tell Them Where to Go” is the money track here, all rust-crusted bass crunch and ragged estrogenated vocal energy. But let’s not put them in the “girl band” ghetto. As I said in my review, “The easy thing would be to compare McKechnie’s vibrato-zinging vocals with those of Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker or her verbal agility to Courtney Barnett, but the blunt force and agile violence of the music, brings to mind post-punk bands like the Wipers, Protomartyr and Eddy Current.”
Honorable mention
I also really enjoyed these albums in 2020.
Lewsberg — In this House (12XU)
Damien Jurado — What’s New Tomboy (Mamabird)
Bill Callahan — Gold Record (Drag City)
Mike Polizze — Long Lost Solace Find (Paradise of Bachelors)
Destroyer — Have We Met (Merge)
Decoy w/ Joe McPhee — AC/DC (otoROKU)
Thurston Moore — By the Fire (Daydream Library)
Tobin Sprout — Empty Horse (Fire)
FACS — Void Moments (Trouble in Mind)
Elkhorn — The Storm Sessions (Beyond Beyond Is Beyond) Â
The songs of the summer night bugs are pretty awesome but if you need something different to jam, the latest episode of the Smashin' Transistors podcast may have such sounds.
Obnox is maybe America’s leading Afro-punk right now, but he’s a lot more than that. In the two-LP Savage Raygun, he once again gathers all the offshoots of Black music—rock, soul, psychedelia, hip hop, punk, electronics and R&B—and brings them together in hazy visions that distill 2020’s smoking wreckage into pure sensation. It doesn’t feel like syncretism, either, but rather the pure force of the African American experience expressed through diverse languages and style. Even the sampled guitar riff from Neil Young’s “Southern Man” (in “Young Neezy”) sounds like it belongs to Nox here, supporting his point that this moment, volatile as it is, reaches back through American history all the way back.
In fact, if you’re looking for a song that encapsulates this summer’s violent energy — as COVID-19 and police brutality and massive protests collide and interact — let me suggest “Underground Timebomb” with its militant beat, its fist-raised chant of “Underground timebomb, below the street that I sit upon,” its ghostly wail of pedal-fucked psychedelic guitars. It’s Jimi Hendrix running into Curtis Mayfield at a punk fundraiser for Black Lives Matter and it could not be more now (or more five years ago or ten or 20, this stuff has been happening for a long time).
Nox rifles through the style book, with a couple of tracks booming and swaggering with early hip hop bravado (“Party Starter,” “How to Build a Bum,” the truly incendiary “Cut Me a Switch”), others floating like the ghosts of punk songs heard through abandoned concrete in abandoned buildings (“Supernatural”), still others essaying a soul falsetto over banged and blasted R&R soundscapes (“Heaven”). There are a few intervals that remind me a lot of Dilla in the way they balance jazz and soul and hip hop in short instrumental bits.
And yet, despite this diversity, Savage Raygun never sounds like a one of each, or a look what I can do kind of record. In fact, its power grows when you listen to it all end to end. It is one howl, one reminiscence, one statement of resilience all the way through. This is not just a good record or an enjoyable record, but a necessary one, the current murk of rage and hope and confusion distilled into blistering sounds. Â
