Music is a thing in itself: Jennifer Kelly’s 2019 in review
Incredible set at Solid Sound from Mdou Moctar
Last week, for the first time in ages, I went to an honest to god party, attended mostly by people I didn’t know. As one does, I struck up a conversation with a young woman I’d seen at some shows. I asked her what she was listening to, and I was flummoxed by the answer. This woman’s listening was entirely determined by the mood she was seeking. A Spotify customer, a devotee of themed lists, she could not (or possibly would not) name a single artist, only a nebulous emotion — upbeat or mellow or whatever way they were supposed to make her feel.
It was a friendly conversation. I didn’t get upset or, I think, upset the other person. But it struck me that, for her, music had been packaged in a way that handbags once were, as a way to match your shoes, your outfit, your view of yourself. What the artists who made the music wanted or tried or succeeded or failed at was entirely beside the point. Who they were or where they’d been or what they themselves loved about music was even less relevant. It was music as a commodity or accessory, and while I can’t judge and I’m happy oncoming generations still seek out music in whatever form pleases them, I found it as inscrutable as Martian runes.
I’m guessing this is why we have to die, because at some point the world becomes unrecognizable.
In any case, personal obsolescence aside, 2019 was a good year (as they are all good in different ways), full of surprising advances from artists I knew and new discoveries from ones I didn’t. There was plenty of great musicianship to be had, and since I love rock and punk and guitars, also that indefinable thing that is not musicianship but makes the music great anyway. Here are my favorites. They made me feel different things at different times and anyway seemed to exist in a satisfyingly independent way from whatever I might be feeling. I reviewed most of them over the course of the year, and there are links where available.
1. Steve Gunn—The Unseen In Between (Matador)
The Unseen In Between by Steve Gunn
Over the last several albums, Steve Gunn has progressively outgrown the guitar slinger label, and made his mark as a songwriter. The Unseen in Between contains his best set of songs yet, arranged in shimmering, multidimensional ways that caused me to observe, “It’s hard to say whether Gunn is paring back or building out. He’s getting better at constructing songs that are as easy and as complicated as life itself.” “Vagabond” was my favorite song all year.
2. Mdou Moctar—Ilana (The Creator) (Sahel Sounds)
Ilana: The Creator by Mdou Moctar
The best guitar album of the year, the best live show, the best (and unlikeliest) link ever between North Africa’s desert blues, Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen. Moctar’s set at an unbearably hot, crowded Solid Sound festival made the whole ticket worthwhile; I couldn’t tell if I was swaying from heat stroke or from the hallucinatory power of the music or maybe some sort of weird amalgamation of the two. “I could live in this groove forever,” I whispered in my husband’s ear, but then Moctar ripped into an obliterating, left-handed, double-tapping guitar pyro-frenzy that lifted off into the upper atmosphere.
3. Dark Blue—Victory Is Rated (12XU)
Victory Is Rated by Dark Blue
A big barreling rock album, full of hollowed-out baritone plaints and freewheeling pinch squeals, Victory Is Rated caps an astonishing post-Clockcleaner run for frontman John Sharkey III. I wrote, “Dark Blue rolls over you like a freight train, a mass of shadowy, goth-y, gut-shocked overload that takes no pains to minimize itself.”
4. Uranium Club—The Cosmo Cleaners (Toxic State)
The Cosmo Cleaners by Uranium Club
My twitchy, touchy, sharp-edged, sharp-tongued post-punk landmark, this bonkers-good (and just bonkers) release from the sometime Minneapolis-based Uranium Club. The fast songs flick and punch and shock, but the long, dead-panned monologues (“Michael’s Soliloquy,” “Interview with the Cosmo Cleaners”) built paranoiac worlds hedged in with mayhem. Discomfort danced awkwardly on hot coals in “Definitely Infrared Radiation Sickness” and “Grease Monkey” proposed indecencies to a car. Said, me at Dusted, “Uranium Club is in a mad scrappy fugue state, rattling over rough tracks with wheels in the air. Cuts like “Flashback Arrestor,” with its boxy whiff of the Ex at double time, seem always prone to spin off out of control, yet land, after all that fury, on an absolute dime.” Crazy fun, punk of the year.
5. Sleaford Mods—Eton Alive (Extreme Eating)
Let us remember 2019 as the year that I got to interview Jason Williamson and delightedly observed that he talks just like he sings, with long flat vowels, a chip on his shoulder and an undeniable poetic cadence only lacking a bass line to make it a song. Eton Alive works the spit and bile to a craftsmanlike finish, digging into consumerism, excessive drinking, and pompous rock stars with a casual malice.
6. The Gotobeds—Debt Begins at 30 (Sub Pop)
Debt Begins at 30 by THE GOTOBEDS
Such a great rock record, tight as a drum, but open-ended enough to welcome a whole bunch of my favorite rockers—people from Protomartyr and Silkworm and Shellac and Downtown Boys. Play counts say that I listened to these songs more than almost any others in 2019, and that makes sense. Why would you ever skip ahead? My review at Dusted concluded, “’Calquer the Hound,’ is a slow moving fist-fight of a song, punching hard but in no hurry, its down-slashed guitar chords close to ripping the strings off the instrument, its drumming full of headlong abandon, its bass anchoring but anarchic, a solid but unconforming foundation. The emergence of a sing-along chorus out of this hedge of sharp, serrated sounds is welcome, and if you didn’t know the Gotobeds, it might even be a little surprising. But this is the sort of trick this band is always pulling, embedding little bits of indelible tune in uncompromising bouts of aggression, and they’ve never been better at it.”
7. Bill Callahan—Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest (Drag City)
Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest by Bill Callahan
These songs have been rattling around in my head since the summer, stopping in for a word at odd moments, resonating like conversations and feeling oddly true. This is not a fancy album. It’s got lots of silence in it between the spare bits of guitar, the disquieted hollow tones of Callahan’s voice. But it’s a beauty, that’s for sure, that evokes other beauties hidden in the everyday. What I said in my review still seems true, that is, “Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest is a quiet album that will tell you about the succession of small, resonant moments that make up a day, a month, a life. Sit still for that, soak it in and let it breathe, and you start to see the glow behind the ordinary, not just in Callahan’s album, but in the world itself.”
8. The House Guests—My Mind Set Me Free (Shake It)
Bootsie Collins and his brother Catfish shoehorned their stint as the House Guests into a single year (1971) in between backing James Brown and George Clinton, and aside from a couple of singles (see the youtube above) most of the music has been unavailable ever since. Shame that, but lucky we now have this reissue, because it smokes unbelievably hard. As I said for Dusted last August, “Funk doesn’t get much better than this, then or now or ever,”
9. Bill MacKay—Fountain Fire (Drag City)
Fountain Fire by Bill MacKay
My favorite solo guitar album this year (also loved Chris Brokaw’s End of the Night), Fountain Fire infused acoustic finger-pickers and electric jams with an eerie, spirit-stirring slide. I’m even going to risk two Hendrix reference in one essay with a little bit of my Dusted review: “The most striking track, though, is ‘Arcadia’ near the end, a buzz and moan and tremble of electrified sound that wails and shifts in feedback-sheathed fire. It reminds me of Hendrix’s ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ which is not a comparison I’d make lightly, but Mackay makes his instrument express joy and wonder and agony like a voice, only more so, with all the notes that hang around watching and normally silent sucked into his vibrating drone.”
10. Damien Jurado—The Shape of a Storm (Mama Bird)
This one crept up on me, as Jurado albums often do, gradually overtaking other, showier pieces of work and quietly insisting on being heard. It’s not as giddy and intoxicating as the Maraqopa series that Jurado made with Richard Swift, but rather simpler, plainer and delivered sparedly with just guitar and voice. But there’s a playful surreality in “Newspaper Gown,” and an aching transcendance in "Silver Ball," and the whole album is god-damn pure and beautiful. I wrote, “By grounding his work in the simplest of arrangements, using the shortest and most commonplace of words, Jurado evokes a world that is perfectly ordinary on the surface, but that vibrates with otherworldly resonances.”
I also loved these.
11. Vagabon—S-T (Nonesuch)
12. Red River Dialect—Abundance Welcoming Ghosts (Paradise of Bachelors)
13. Chris Brokaw—The End of the Night (VDSQ)
14. Trash Kit—Horizon (Upset the Rhythm)
15. Pedro the Lion—Phoenix (Polyvinyl)
16. Possible Humans — Everybody Split (Trouble in Mind)
17. Jaimie Branch—Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise (International Anthem)
18. Garcia Peoples—Natural Facts (BBIB)
19. The Proper Ornaments—Six Lenins (Tapete)
20. Pan•American—A Son (Kranky)
