In this recap:
Top 25 Albums of 2020 + honorable mentions
Top 25 Songs of 2020 + honorable mentions
2020 Superlatives
2020 Wrap-Up: Female Vocalists, 80’s Revival, and Existentialism
You can find my Top 25 Songs of 2020 playlist on Spotify here
You can follow the Nomadic Ear instagram page here
TOP 25 ALBUMS OF 2020:
25. Shore - Fleet Foxes
An album you start throwing on for the atmosphere - maybe the soundtrack to a morning autumn walk, then you go back to it a while later and realize that you inadvertently know every song by heart, because underneath the palpable atmosphere and gorgeous harmonies are some really memorable songs and melodies.
Fleet Foxes just have an infallible core sound. As soon as you hear Robin Pecknold’s voice you know what you’re listening to. And not just because his voice is distinct; Fleet Foxes have really carved out a niche in modern folk music.
I like the aesthetic shift on this album. As the title suggests, there’s definitely something about this that feels more watery. There’s a lot of reverby horns and seemingly more piano than past albums. When you’re a band with this much of a distinct sound you have a lot of liberty to play around with your aesthetic in these ways and still maintain what makes your music so special.
24. Róisín Machine - Róisín Murphy
As the great disco revival seems to be upon us, Róisín Murphy reminds us of a few things. First of all, don’t water down those intricate funky bass lines: let the bassists go wild. Second, don’t be so rigid about song structure: give us an 8-minute trancey/trippy disco epic, give us a song where everything sounds like a chorus. Third, every song doesn’t need to be a love song: write songs about Greek myths and human nature.
From the basslines, to the strings, and right down to her classic vocal style, this thing sounds in some ways like it was pulled right out of 1979. Yet, as the album starts to unfold in the first few minutes and her voice repeats the line “This is a simulation” over and over again with a heavy delay, there’s something that makes this album transcend its seeming connection to a bygone era and feel contrastingly futuristic. And with borderline-anthropological lyrics like “This is the darker side of a beautiful feeling / Born out of chemistry and a tangle of needing” in the closing track Jealousy, she’s able to make a piece of art that really feels like it’s stretching our concept of the past and present - through the power of disco of course.
23. Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic - The Ocean
The thematic nature of The Ocean’s music is impossible not to mention at first when looking at an album like this. They’ve been releasing science themed music for so long that a couple real paleontologists named a fossil they discovered in the Medierranean sea after the band this year.
But it’s pretty clear, even without direct recognition by the scientific community, how much this commitment impacts their music. At this point, The Ocean have carved out such a thematic niche for themselves that, if you’ve listened to them before, putting on this album makes you feel immediately like you’re getting sucked back into their prehistoric world. They’re just so forthright about it with the song titles and everything: they’re creating artistic representations of different geological epochs with their instruments.
They’re so particular even, that on the song Pleistocene, which is the epoch more commonly known as the ice age (a fact I totally knew beforehand and didn’t have to look up), they break into a surprising sort of black metal section at the end, evoking the distinct Scandenavian coldness associated with that style.
On the final track, Holocene, which is in fact the current geological epoch, they do what seems like a lot of building anticipation and then close out the main groove of the song quite suddenly. It’s quite an unusual way to end an epic double album of metal, especially when most of their other songs do have big endings to them. But of course, it fits perfectly with the idea of our modern epoch, and it’s own uncertain ending. If you ever need proof that metal music is art The Ocean should be your go-to example.
22. Lianne La Havas - Lianne La Havas
The combination of her creative electric guitar playing and killer, soulful voice makes Lianne La Havas one of a kind.
Right from the start of the album she comes at you with everything she has vocally, on Bittersweet. I don’t feel like I need to explain my love for this song too much. Just listen for the moments in the song when the instruments drop out before the chorus and Lianne passionately belts out the words “No more hanging around!”. No explanation needed. It’s just pure soul.
There’s a genuineness to this album and it’s live sort of feel, as well. The jazzy electric guitar tones and tight percussion give her powerfully soulful voice the perfect sort of honest and intimate context.
With as much pure, heartfelt intimacy as Lianne La Havas offers up on this album, it’s only fitting that the last and longest song on the record, Sour Flower, leaves the most space for her to express everything that makes her music so endearing. It’s the most linear song on the record, starting with some gently gorgeous acoustic guitar and nature sounds before sequentially adding vocals, drums and bass. She starts with a very reserved and vulnerable singing approach but eventually leads up to some of her most powerful vocals on the album.
And then, she ends the album and the song on a sort of jazzy, African-drum jam, which if you listen through to the end, is finalized by Lianne seemingly losing the rhythm and laughingly saying “I lost it”. So much personality in this one song right down to the last detail, and a perfectly creative way to end the album.
21. In Search of the Lost City of the Monkey God - The Sorcerers
The Black Sabbath of jazz? This whole album is a big heaping pile of eastern sounding bass grooves and slow tribal marches. They’ve really carved out a niche with their sound, and that niche is the sound of an archeological expedition through an Aztec ruin deep within the jungle (in fact, they state quite explicitly that this album was written as the soundtrack to an “imagined lost European exploitation film”, which is why the album says “Soundtrack to the Motion Picture on the cover).
Part of the appeal of this in fact is that there are no saxophones, trumpet, trombones or pianos. Instead there’s a lot of flute, clarinet, xylophone and vibraphone, and that instrumental palette really sets a genuinely natural and outdoorsy sort of sound, compared to the city-ness of most jazz. Combined with the eastern harmonic basis of most of these tracks and you’ve got a very distinct atmosphere.
You really have to give the bassist credit though. He’s got gnarly bass grooves coming out of his ears and drives the rugged fervor of this album from front to back.
20. What's Your Pleasure? - Jessie Ware
It goes without saying that this is great dance music, but what I want to comment on is the atmosphere. She doesn’t really do much belting and there aren’t really any ‘bangers’ on the album. It’s all very trancey. In fact, the catchiness of songs like the title track have a very kind of sensual and smoothly subdued feel. It all feels very genuine to me.
Whoever produced this did an amazing job - all the synth and bass tones strike a perfect balance of clarity and smoothness. Sometimes dance music just feels like a very cheap attempt to get you moving; like it overhypes itself. What Jessie Ware does on this album is provide a collection of very unassuming dance music that still appeals to the listener on the emotional level that a great songwriter can reach, well also using those funk sounds and dance rhythms to induce you to move in a way that expresses that emotion, if that makes sense.
Put more simply, it’s dance music with great songwriting. And because of the songwriting, she doesn’t have to beat you over the head with the beat. Every track maintains a certain minimal standard of funky, synth bass-driven grooviness and every track has at least one hook that keeps you coming back. She really just locks into a songwriting groove from the beginning and keeps it going til the end.
19. Kathleen I & II - Kathleen
I’m kind of cheating here; this is two different EPs released separately this year and I’m taking the liberty to call them one album. Are they? No. But whatever. I just feel like I couldn’t leave out all these great songs.
There’s a couple songs from these two EP’s that were in contention for my favorite songs of the year. She has such a great handle on the art of creating beautifully intricate vocal melodies. I fully expect her to reach much more success in the coming years. Mark my words.
The head voice chorus melodies in Asking the Aspens off of the first EP are unbelievably gorgeous. The uptempo energy of Seven Miles is infectious. And the first song on her second EP, August, is a gut-wrenching ballad centered around the passionate lament of: “I was never told that perfect love could end”. I’ll be very excited to hear when she comes out with a full LP, but I just couldn’t hold off on mentioning what she did this year.
18. Fluid Existential Inversions - Intronaut
This album feels very “scientific” for some reason. Not just because of the title and artwork (although that helps). It’s something about their songwriting formula; the clear dynamic between metal grooves and atmospheric rock. It’s like they have two totally distinct modes designed to enhance the other perfectly.
They’ve always had a very particular prehistoric desert sort of vibe (just a look at all their past album covers), and I think that part of the aesthetic change is that they seem to be upping the tempo a lot this time. They’ve generally been a slower, groovier metal band. On this album they’re still groovy, but they’re going almost thrashy at times as well, and it’s cool how this changes the vibe of the music. It makes things seem more futuristic. It gives a sensation of flying through an asteroid belt or something. And it also gives their new drummer more than a few chances to show off. This album is filled to the brim with rhythmic detail. It feels like I notice a new drum fill every time I listen.
I will say the vocals feel a bit more adventurous on this release as well. The vocal melodies on Speaking of Orbs have a unique sort of haunting harmony that adds more emotional nuance to the song, and serves to contrast against that pummeling riff that comes back in at the end after they repeat the chorus one last time. The vocals on Cubensis show another side too. In this instance however, they put a meaner sort of character inflection on some of the vocal lines in order to accentuate the aggression of the song.
I suppose it’s not completely different from anything Intronaut has released before, but it just goes to show how altering your aesthetic, using some new guitar pedals, speeding things up a bit, and messing with your approach to vocals can in and of itself reinvent the emotive reaction of the listener. That’s great for a band like Intronaut who have a really effective approach to groovy/atmospheric progressive metal songwriting, as it allows them to put out another album capitalizing on their sound that still feels really fresh.
17. Better Mess - Ashley Zarah
A mere 6 track EP, but there’s a reason it’s on the list. These pop songs are of a very consistently high quality. Dark, emotional, climactic, dense production, and at the core of each track, fantastic songwriting.
Take for example, the stripped beginning and gradual build up that leads into a powerful perspective change in the lyrics on Everybody Knows, accentuated with an emotionally riveting switch into the top of her range. The same could be said of the opening track Fakin’ It, which starts off with it’s own very cinematic piano/vocal part before escalating into an epic symphony of electronica.
She’s great at using her voice to portray emotion, both in the traditional heartfelt belting sort of way, and also her ability to add a sort of sneering inflection to her voice at the right moment, like on the “our love isn’t always positive” part on the title track, or the hastily sung kind of anxiousness on the pre-chorus of the same song. This would be very high up on my list if it was longer and could have even tussled for number one if it kept up the same quality.
16. Existential Reckoning - Puscifer
I don’t know if this entire album was written during the lockdown but it sure as hell feels like it. The first lyric on this album is “Here we are in the middle of our existential reckoning”. The last lyric is the repetition of “It’s gonna be alright / Everything will be alright”. And in between we get lines like, “Go on, moron, ignore the evidence / Skid in to Armageddon”, and “Nothing factual, nothing fictional, interchangeable / This is the age of confusion”. As things get weirder and weirder in our world, we need more music that directly seeks to artistically express our existential and civilization quagmires the way that this album does.
It feels so relevant, and what makes it really special is that they’re not afraid of contextualizing these lyrics amidst an uncannily futuristic instrumental vista. This is probably the quirkiest thing Maynard James Keenan has ever released, but the weirdness seems perfectly 2020-apropos. It’s a little early-Kate Bush-y at times even, I think, in it’s deliberate weirdness.
And aside from being sort of playful, a lot of the male-female vocal interplay between him and Carina Round elicits a sense of almost parental authority and wisdom; not in a condescending way, but in a way that feels like they’re bringing some objective sense to a crazy world with an enlightened, third-person vantage point. And by the end of the album, that enlightenment really feels like it’s rubbed off on you emotionally.
15. Omens - Elder
All the synths may make this album seem like a departure from their heavier sound, and it is, but you’ve got to admit that the fusion of stoner rock and psychedelic rock is a wedding that just seems so natural. This album is my favorite incarnation of Elder for that reason.
This sound really suits Elder given their tendency to write longer songs, because it seems like this direction has given them a wider range of emotional depth. Even though I typically like this kind of music to be raw and dirty, there’s something really special about how emotionally powerful these long and winding compositions are.
And I love when they incorporate those mellotron sounds. Even the kind of moog synth sounds they use, which I’m typically not that into, serve a function of really disarming the hard rock core of many of these songs and help Elder to hammer home the laid back vibe that they’re going for while still giving us all those meaty stoner rock riffs that define their sound.
At this point there’s a lot of stoner rock out there, and Elder have made some mighty contributions to that genre. I’m really glad to see them pushing things in a new direction and even though this is in some sense less of a “stoner rock” album, it is more of a literal “stoner” rock album in my opinion, if you catch my drift. What I mean is that I recommend that you do drugs and listen to this album.
14. songs - Adrianne Lenker
One of the most inspiring artistic choices this year to me is the title of this album. Such a great example of simple genius. There are a few moments on this album where she includes a kind of false start outtake from the recording session to start a song, or external sounds that most people would edit out or demand another take because of, or things of this nature.
These aren’t totally revolutionary production choices, but the principled dedication to this sort of unpolished and carefree aesthetic goes an incredibly long way when combined with her very humble and vulnerable voice, and stripped down songwriting style, to make a powerful kind of genuine and honest emotional resonance to her music.
Underneath the aesthetic however are some deceitfully sophisticated and well-written compositions. She really does know what she’s doing in terms of chord choice and consideration for vocal melodies, so you get the best of both worlds in a way: music that feels very genuine and personal on an aesthetic level, but doesn’t sacrifice the emotional range that is offered by a determined manipulation of harmony and melody. It’s something that is sometimes lost on folk musicians who are so carefree that they don’t take their art seriously. Adrianne Lenker does take her art very seriously and on this album her art is all about honest, direct, heartfelt emotion.
13. There is no Year - Algiers
Algiers are one of those bands whose sonic foundations and character are so strong that no matter what direction they take their music in I’ll almost certainly come to love it. The sound on this new LP is a bit surprising in that it features a lot more 80’s-evoking synths, while also delving deeper into Joy Division-esque post-punk territory (another 80’s vibe). It’s a bit of a juxtaposition because I typically think of Algiers as having a very forward thinking sound, despite the clear 60’s and 70’s soul vocals. On their last album even, there were some very palpable hip hop influences in a number of the instrumentals.
I wouldn’t say that I prefer this direction, but what I appreciate is when a band with such a strong core character like these guys switch things up and show how their sound feels in a different context. The result in this case is what sounds like the soundtrack to a night drive through a sketchy part of New York City in the mid-80’s. It feels dark and gritty in some sense, but that sensation is presented in a romantically historicized way, and with the political lyrical undertones it ends up feeling a bit like a historical allegory for modern conditions depicted through music.
And I’ve really noticed that Algiers are great at sounding kind of angry yet catchy at the same time. When you listen to the title track, the soulful ‘ohs’ in the chorus, mixed with the repeated line “And it’s only to get shot down”, combine to create such an energizing vibe, both in the sing-a-long way and because of the biting emotional passion behind it.
12. After Hours - The Weeknd
What sticks out to me so much about this album is how natural the different elements he combines feel together. In many ways this is a highly forward thinking take on pop music. But the way that he combines Michael Jackson-esque falsetto-filled R&B, a modern Hip-Hop ‘hardness’, and 80’s synthpop feels so fluid and comfortable; as if it wasn’t new at all. Rather than forward thinking, this does feel like (and is) the music of now.
Production-wise I’m impressed by the incredible density of the synths on this record. Every song has an ocean of texture to it, which it turns works perfectly with the powerful and cutting trap percussion to really fill up your speakers with atmosphere. I love how on Too Close they really let that dark and dense synthscape play out for the final minute of the song in cinematic fashion; it’s almost John Carpenter-esq for a moment there.
The best moments of the album I think, are when he perfectly holds off on introducing the beat til just the right moment. On the song Faith, the way that the beat comes in right on the line “And if you O.D. I wanna O.D. right beside you” is such a release of emotional energy.
Out of all the releases that really channeled the 80’s this year, and there were quite a few, The Weeknd had the freshest take.
11. Fetch the Bolt Cutters - Fiona Apple
I am totally late on the Fiona Apple train. And I immediately see what I was missing out on. This album contains some of the most unapologetically impassioned vocals I’ve ever had the pleasure of snarling my face up to, if you know what I mean (if you don’t, listen to Newspaper).
There’s a kind of classic bluesy meanness to her that coalesces with a very modern and defiant feminine confidence. Still she manages to be simultaneously playful and endearing, with a sort of Joni Mitchell-esque personal and anecdotal storytelling. But whereas Joni Mitchell was angelic and folky, Fiona Apple is biting and visceral (the bridge lyrics of For Her - “Good morning, good morning / You raped me in the same bed our daughter was born in” - are hard not to mention).
This anecdotal lyric style has e a gasoline-fire relationship with the uniquely percussive instrumental backdrops of many of these songs, which really distinguishes her music from the alternative of a more traditionally stripped down or traditionally arranged production. Because of this I would say even that there’s somewhat of an element of African-American spirituals to these songs.
Ultimately the music is so personal. You really feel like you know her while listening to her music. And you feel like she would scoff and you for saying that and write a song about how you don’t know her.
10. Of Valleys and Mountains - Pull Down the Sun
This doesn’t feel like a debut album. In fact, somehow these guys feel like a band that I’ve been listening to for years.
That’s not to say that I think they’re overly derivative. I can pretty easily categorize this as Atmospheric Sludge Metal and Post-Metal, with hints of Gojira on songs like the title track. And the aesthetic is a familiar one - mountainous, prehistoric, a heaviness that reflects natural wonder; not unlike bands I mention elsewhere on this list: Intronaut and The Ocean. What I mean more is that Pull Down the Sun commit so strongly to an aesthetic of earthly magnificence, be it through the beautiful album artwork, the album title, or the tones they use themselves, that the music itself feels immediately and intrinsically meaningful.
On Salt of the Earth for example, the reverbed out lead guitars give a distinct sense of openness - like a valley. The gruff, harsh vocals they employ have a primal sort of intensity. The atmospheric passages have a sense of wonder, like looking out over a vista.
I know that I think all of this because of the artwork and the title to a large extent. But that’s exactly the point. These guys set an aesthetic target and did everything that they could do to nail it. The most effective example of this is simply the dynamic contrast that goes on throughout the album. More songs than not have some sort of distinct, mellow passage.
On a few tracks, like Ngaro for example, they achieve an uncanny level of beauty for this genre via a serene intro/verse section and some heavenly lead guitar melodies. But when they do get heavy, they get really heavy - if you need proof listen for the destructive riffage at the end of Weta.
The title of the album really serves a circular function with the music, in that it describes the flow of the album perfectly while the music also evokes that sort of powerful natural imagery itself. When artistic themes and musical choices flow into each other like this, it exponentially increase the emotive resonance of the album in a way; much more so than if the band simply tacked on an aesthetic after writing the music. And ultimately, that makes the music on this debut so easy to identify with from the moment you see the artwork, read the title, and press play.
9. Live at the Jazz Gallery - Big Heart Machine
Third year in a row one of Brian Krock’s projects will have an album on my list. Needless to say I think the guy has something special going on. This album is actually in some sense his least crazy so far, but in another sense his darkest.
It’s a pretty melodic jazz album in a way. It almost has a 19th century kind of classical darkness to it and I get that sense immediately from the opening of the first track, Unblock the Stoppage. I’m actually inclined to draw a comparison to Holst’s Mars at points because of the sort of dissonant and aggressive staccato sections that Krock conducts his band to play.
The live element really does add a palpable sort of energy and realness to the recording that brings out the emotion of the compositions. His first Big Heart Machine release was maybe more ambitious compositionally, but more precise and calculated sounding relative to this one.
It also sort of sounds like the soundtrack to a 60’s crime thriller at times; or maybe a monster movie if you listen to the final track, Paradoliac. In fact, I really love how the album is structured with the two particularly dark tracks at the very beginning and the very end. Brain Krock is really using his talent as a big band conductor to show us what jazz music is capable of.
8. Origin of the Alimonies - Liturgy
The reason I enjoy listening to Liturgy is that the music seems totally unrestrained creatively. Aside from the black metal, there’s elements of electronics, classical music, and it even forays into a bit of free jazz/free improvisation on the track The Fall of SIHEYMN, which is an incredibly unique, must-listen track in it’s own right.
There is a lot of space and moments where the music feels like it’s finding itself, which works as great contrast to the sections that are saturated with blast-beats and all sorts of other sounds. There’s some really wild stuff going on with all the stops and tempo changes, as well. It’s very emotive, the sort of ‘bursts of energy’ that this liberal approach to rhythmic structure summons.
The album itself feels like a series of visceral revelations. And it does feel like a bizarre spiritual experience in a way.
I do get the impression that this album was thrown together quicker than the last one, but that actually seems like an advantage, as the music is even more uncharacterizable. It’s just a stream of consciousness from and a wonderfully liberated artistic mind. This type of music just wouldn’t exist without Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (Liturgy’s composer/singer/guitarist), and that’s a very cool place to be in as an artist.
7. Shabrang - Sevdaliza
This is an album of truly open-minded music. Sevdaliza has a beautiful voice, but it’s almost always obscured by either some sort of vocal processing or by her own physical restraint and subtlety. Musically, the album goes into some very progressively electronic and industrial territory at times, but also features a lot of totally elegant violin and piano playing.
One thing that strikes me as important is that the instrumental playing is itself very creatively liberated, in the sense that it really sounds like she brought on some truly skilled musicians to add their voices to her songs, including a couple of very passionate instrumental solos. I wish more pop music was like this.
You really never know what direction these songs are gonna take from the beginning. You could end up with a gorgeous piano solo like at the end of the final track, Comet. Or you could end up with a noisey sort of, symphonic industrial jam like at the end of No Way. I really appreciate how much character she imposes on the songs by taking them in unique directions, and really using her sort of pensive pop style to build up tension to some rather climactic endings.
And although her style is very subtle in some ways, there’s a number of songs that are propelled by heavy hip-hop inspired bass and percussion as well, making for some songs that I can only describe as being ‘haunting bangers’, like Lamp Lady for example.
Ultimately, all this contrast creates a very mysterious vibe that runs throughout the album. And with lines like “I wanna know my god / At least enough to fear her”, I’m not sure if this music is religious or sacrilegious, but that just adds to the mystery.
6. on the tender spot of every calloused moment - Ambrose Akinmusire
The album basically showcases exactly what it is about jazz that people who like it find so appealing. This collection of musicians is absolutely fantastic, and they all get a chance to shine while contributing to these pieces.
Even though the trumpet player is the band leader, the star of the show for me might be the drummer; so much constant creativity on his part, especially with his cymbal work. This is something that really separates a great jazz album from a decent one to me, when the drummer is always doing something interesting to contribute creatively to the song.
As I said though, everyone is excellent. A lot of the piano playing is just wildly elegant, and of course Akinmusire’s trumpet playing is equally deserving of praise. I really enjoy the weird, winding melodies on Mr. Roscoe. Even though it’s trumpet and not sax, it reminds me a bit of Ornette Coleman, and that’s a big compliment.
But my favorite parts are when they really let loose. An Interlude (that get’ more intense) is an impassioned jam that builds up from an unassuming bass solo to a storm of avant-garde intensity and some very forceful piano playing. If you want to hear a real showcase of their intensity take a listen to the first track, Tide of Hyacinth. I love how pull off that really uptempo part at the end with Akinmusire going crazy on his solo and bringing things to a high point before the close it out with one final, synchronized impact. These guys really feel like one unified musical organism growing in real time.
5. May You Be Held - Sumac
It’s been so interesting hearing Sumac evolve album after album as they delve more into balancing their penchant for free improvisation with savagely heavy sludge metal. This is the first Sumac album that really feels like it’s half improvisation and half composition.
Listening to this album for the first time is really like watching a movie unfold. At this point, they’re just embracing the chaos and allowing it to inform the emotive direction of their music. I’m really glad to hear them incorporating more extended improvised sections, particularly the more darkly amelodic atmospheric sections that open and close the LP. While I could see these parts alienating some listeners, I think they build up so much tension towards the heavier and more structured parts.
In some sense it really feels like you can hear the songs themselves emerging out of the nothingness. It feels like you can hear them looking for the riff and groove that they eventually find. If I can take a bit of liberty here, it feels like some sort of mechanical monster gradually becoming self-aware and getting accustomed to its surroundings and its body before going on a destructive rampage. It slowly goes in and out of consciousness but when it does gain control over itself it is able to harness an incredible amount of power.
There’s some obvious extension of this analogy to human nature I could go on to try and make, but I’ll just leave it at that. There’s something very evocative about the chaos that Sumac are creating on this album as they continue to push the boundaries of metal music.
4. Visions of Bodies Being Burned - clipping.
I’m certainly not in a minority touting this album’s innovative allure, but as someone who hasn’t been as impressed by a lot of the hip hop that other people have described as being innovative over the past few years, it’s really exciting for me to actually agree with everyone.
The abrasiveness that these guys dabble in adds an element of heaviness to their music that I’ve never heard expressed in hip hop. The fact that they integrate that heaviness so seamlessly into a horror-based artistic aesthetic is what makes it so special though. They’re not just paving the way for a new sound in hip hop, it really feels like they’ve arrived at that sound’s artistic pinnacle. In other words, it doesn’t seem like they’re pushing the boundaries of production for the sake of progress, but rather for the sake of embellishing the already established themes of their music.
Somehow though, this experimentation does not come at the sacrifice of accessibility. One of the most impressive things about this album, in fact, is the amount of lyrical lines that are very catchy, but also serve to explicitly indulge the horror aesthetic that they have going on. I think it’s rather amazing how repeated lines like, “He check the lock every time he walk by the door”, and “You can't run, you just a body for the pile… And you should probably take your last breath right about now”, end up sounding so catchy.
Of course, the production of this album is what leaves most people so gratifyingly dumbfounded - me included. When I listen to Enlacing I wonder how it’s possible that a song can sound so packed with atmosphere yet also so stripped down and barren at the same time. They really know how to control the lower register of a mix.
It’s worth noting as well, how they use the widened dynamic range that their experimental production offers at times to push the typical structural limitations of rap. On Say the Name for example, they extend the song into industrial territory for an intense ending. Then on Pain Everyday, they end the song with a sublime mix of strings and spastic percussion to create a surprisingly mellodramatic climax in a bipolar sort of way.
I’m not going out on a limb here at all, but I predict these guys will be hugely influential on the future of rap. Based on how much I enjoyed this album, I really hope that I’m right.
3. Sanación - María José Llergo
It’s exciting to hear an artist pioneering a new genre. But what’s more exciting is when you see that genre emerging as a scene. I was so excited to hear Rosalia pioneering flamenco pop with her breakthrough album in 2018 (excited enough that I named it my album of the year). Listening to this debut LP by Maria Jose Llergo, I felt like I was seeing that new genre take off out of the hands of one artist and become something that (hopefully) many people will put their creative spin on in the years to come.
Llergo does this with an incredible balance of traditional sounds and modern electronics, or in some sense an incredible restraint on a part of the electronics. In fact, it’s probably not accurate to call this pop. It’s not too far from being a straight up flamenco album. On Nana del Mediterráneo, she begins by hauntingly singing over an electronic drone before gently transitioning into a stunningly beautiful and stripped down yet reverby acoustic guitar/vocal flamenco duet.
Much of the non-flamenco sounds in this are very subtle. In a few key moments however, they are very unsubtle and those moments really stand out, especially on the closing track Me Miras Pero No Me Ves which is an absolute banger.
It’s quite interesting even how the album seems to become gradually more electronic and less traditional as it progresses to that final very un-traditional moment; almost like she’s demonstrating the evolution from old to new. The second to last track, El Péndulo, for example, is also the second most electronica-involved track, but still finishes with a gorgeous string arrangement.
Overall, the vocals themselves are just so immensely passionate from the first second of the album to the last. Everything I hear from these bona fide flamenco singers makes my jaw drop. It might be my favorite style of singing.
But Maria Jose Llargo is a bit darker than Rosalia. I’m not sure if she’s really going for a pop flamenco merger here, or is just seeking to do straight up experimental flamenco. But I do think that the ambiguity between those two interpretations is the strength of this album. It doesn’t feel like it’s just borrowing from flamenco to make pop. It really captures the essence of that beautiful tradition while advancing upon it with new sounds.
2. The Call Within - Tigran Hamasyan
Every year it seems like there’s an ‘I don’t know what genre this is’ album that ends up near the top of my list. Tigran Hamasyan is an accomplished jazz pianist. On paper, this is a jazz album. It doesn’t sound like any jazz I’ve heard though. It’s very meticulously composed and academically constructed music. It seems like nearly every section that comes in has a rhythmic basis that calls for some deep theoretical analysis. As much as I’m impressed by the drummer, I also almost feel bad for him, presuming that Hamasyan wrote all these oddly-timed piano sections and challenged him to make sense of them on the drumkit.
Right from the start on the opening track, Levitation 21, the drummer speeds over a 21/16 groove with mesmerizingly quick and tight cymbal work. Meanwhile, Tigran’s erratic piano motif soaring over adds a whole nother dimension of insanity. The result of this rhythmic complexity is a powerful juxtaposition of chaos and order. It feels totally alien in some ways; like the music is beyond the understanding of the human mind.
There is some progressive rock and metal that are like this, but the jazz-based harmonic vocabulary and virtuosity that Hamasyan brings to the table amid all the rhythmic chaos and order, make this album completely uncomparable to really anything else. It’s amazing how he’s able to precisely transition between all sorts of nuanced harmonic dissonance, tempered beauty, and everything in between. And he does it so smoothly. There’s something about both the piano as a timbre, and Hamsyan’s skills on the instrument, that allow him to ebb and flow between beauty and chaos with implausible fluency. And the harmonic range that he has access to makes this music so much more colorful and passionate than anything else that attempts to be as rhythmically complex and focused as this album consistently is.
The real brilliance is how these two distinct features of the album - rhythmic chaos and order, harmonic chaos and order - perfectly enhance each other and create a very cohesively disorienting and thrilling collection of music. And ultimately that paradoxical parallel between disarray and control reflects something very deep about life itself, and to me that’s what makes this music so powerful on an emotive level. And maybe that explains that album title.
1. Exquisite Corpse - Eleanor Elektra
This is a great example of a genius creative mind putting everything into an idea and making no artistic compromises. These songs would be amazing on their own as stripped down singer-songwriter tunes, just based on Eleanor Elektra’s ever-creative fingerstyle guitar playing and ethereal voice. But the real treat is that we get those fantastic songs assembled under one cohesive concept and embellished extravagantly with dense instrumental arrangements.
The genius of what Eleanor Elektra is accomplishing on this album is best illustrated by how vivid of a character she ingrains in my mind as I listen to it. It’s very distinct. Vocally, she does this thing where she sort of personifies nature. Granted she’s not always doing that directly with her lyrics (sometimes she is, on lines like “I’m propagating a different kind of child / A lung to purify Man’s noxious heat”), but that sort of 3rd person narrative feels, at least to me, to pervade throughout the album as the tangible character that her voice embodies.
This album often features lyrics so artfully elegant that they would stand on their own as poetry without the music, like as she wistfully articulates the cyclical nature of our physical existence with borderline theological reverence in a song like The Beauty Of (“I hope the earth remembers me”, “the beauty of decay is nothing on earth is truly thrown away). From apocalyptic climate change allusions to ritualistic praise of the reciprocity of life, this album just glows with thematic focus. Something about her voice too just feels omniscient. Despite the hefty subject matter however, she delivers these lyrics in what is often a rather playful fashion, almost as if to express the powerful indifference that nature has for human affairs.
Musically, there’s a sort of duality going on that drives this sensation home even further. Although it feels very much like folk music on an aesthetic level, she seems to draw a lot from jazz on a harmonic level.
This is genius in one sense because folk music is often very harmonically simple, and thus feels very personal. Jazz on the other hand, because of it’s harmonic complexity, often seems more emotionally ambiguous. Thus jazz has typically been associated aesthetically with city life and the modern human condition, whereas folk tends to feel more organic, outdoorsy, and reflects the simplicity of our existence.
Since Eleanor Elektra’s music deals in some ways with the overarching existential implications of the natural world and the conflict of human civilization with it, her combination of a folk aesthetic with jazz harmony and instrumentation makes, in my mind, for an incredibly unique depiction of our complex relationship with nature. The impression I get is that she’s telling the story of humanity from the earth’s perspective, and the way that she blends jazz and folk is her method of planting this concept in my head.
This jazzieness would have been harder to pick out if she hadn’t immersed nearly every song in jazz instrumentation. She is consistently accompanied by an upright bassist, and a drummer who plays so delicately that you hardly notice them (it’s actually quite impressive how much finesse the drummer has). Strings, piano and horns appear all throughout the LP and converge at the most intense moments.
The inclusion of these instruments is not an afterthought. The instrumentalists add an abundance of nuance and detail to every song as they navigate the interesting harmonic foundations of Eleanor Elektra’s guitar playing with their own ideas. It seems that she also encourages them to play with a jazz mentality in that sense. A lot of the string playing in particular soars very liberally over the music with its own voice, as can be heard right from the start of the title track that opens the album.
One of the most powerful emotive tools she uses is to very cleverly break up the playfulness of her music’s atmosphere with a somewhat slyly inserted darker chord choice at just the right moment, often adding a slight cinematic and sinister sensation to an otherwise wistful song. Because of this there’s a certain ominous undertone that flows underneath the lighthearted surface of the whole LP. Just when things seem evidently positive, she reminds you of how dark the existential subject matter her music is dealing with actually is. Again, this sort of plays on the idea of a natural power much more important and enduring than us. There’s something both serene and scary about that thought and she does an amazing job of capturing that nuanced paradox.
I don’t know if the way I interpret this album is exactly what she intended, or if she even intended an interpretation as exact as the one that I took away from it, but the fact that I have so much to say about what I see as the concept of this project is precisely the reason that it’s my favorite album of the year.
Whether or not I have it right, there’s something about this record - musically, lyrically, aesthetically, that just engages my mind in an absolutely profound and sublime way. I find the contrast between the softness of the music and the massive, existential emotive atmosphere that she’s able to create with it so compelling. It’s not like anything else I’ve ever heard. Her music just feels bigger than me, bigger than you, and bigger than her. It’s music from the earth and she’s just channeling it. How do you compete with that? You can’t. All the mortal, human artists who released music this year didn’t stand a chance at #1.
Seeing as she’s an independent artist I’m going to leave the bandcamp link to the album here:
https://eleanorelektra.bandcamp.com/album/exquisite-corpse
Honorable Mention Albums of 2020 (bolds were really close):
God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It - Backxwash
Ohms - Deftones
Future Nostalgia - Dua Lipa
May Our Chambers Be Full - Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou
Feberdröm - GAUPA
Alphaville - Imperial Triumphant
KG - King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs - Klô Pelgag
Dark Matter - Moses Boyd
Changing Shapes - Mythic Sunship
Mestarin kynsi - Oranssi Pazuzu
Neba Neba - Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka
Versions of the Truth - The Pineapple Thief
Impulse Voices - Plini
Ultimate Success Today - Protomartyr
SAWAYAMA - Rina Sawayama
Wake of a Nation - Zeal & Ardor
TOP 25 SONGS OF 2020:
(Spotify playlist)
25. Can’t Fight - Lianne La Havas
This is the kind of song that, if someone told me they didn’t like it, I wouldn’t trust them. Lyrics like, “I knew that I should give you up / I tried to run but got my heart stuck / I can't fight away this love”, are so personal and relatable. The line, “when did heaven get so heavy”, in the second verse, is one of the most emotionally cutting, subtle lyrical moments of the year. From the chorus-effect guitar to the beautiful melodies and harmonies, everything about this song just demands catharsis in the most inviting way.
24. Narcissus - Róisín Murphy
This song satisfies two needs as a music listener that I rarely see put together. The song itself is fun as hell, in all it’s funkiness. But it’s also a rather cerebral song, playing on the greek tragedy of Narcissus lyrically. The break around 3-minutes has an awesome string of vocals, and the part where she sings, “If you fall in love with your reflection you may be damned / But, darling, I could teach you to feel and to understand” is totally euphoric because of the duality of her powerful voice and those enchanting lyrics.
I can’t not mention the strings in this song as well. The section that immediately follows the one I just mentioned features a fantastically playful sort of string arrangement solo over the main bass groove. This is way more than just a disco song both musically and lyrically.
23. Pareidoliac - Big Heart Machine
Imagine if Charles Mingus scored the final, climactic 8-minutes of a horror movie. I just love the darkness and intensity that music can generate being channeled through the medium of a live big band jazz recording. The very avant-garde noise-making on a part of the Trumpet player adds a perfect amount of weirdness and chaos to the performance as well. Keep the dark big band coming, please.
22. Midnight Sky - Miley Cirus
I’ve never liked a Miley Cyrus song before. But damn, with age her voice is becoming too magnificently mean to ignore. Critics have said that this new album is a rock album, but I’d really like to hear her doing some ‘real’ hard rock music, if you know what I mean. That being said, I think this song is pretty awesome in it’s own right, aside from how nasty her vocals sound. The main melody that the song is based around is fantastic. The bassline is groovy as hell. The verses have got a cool, sort of hasty southern gallop to them. And the “Don’t need to be loved by you” hook is a great line. I love the final aggressive “loved by you” in the last second as well.
21. Whare Ra - Pull Down the Sun
It’s a bit of an odd choice from this album because although this is the second song, it does kind of feel like an introduction song to the album. The vocals don’t come in until about four-minutes, and I remember first listening to this album and wondering if it was going to be an instrumental album right up to that point, which made the introduction of the harsh vocals along with that viously slow, sludgey, twisted groove metal riff all the more powerful when I heard it.
I do actually like the vocals that they do on the album a lot, so I’m not just picking the song with the least vocals for that reason. I just really like the sort of delay-ridden clean guitar post rock build up into heaviness on this track. And the fact that they bring in the harsh vocals right at the end makes it really impactful in a unique way, and in the context of the album it does a great job setting everything else up.
20. Yessss - Ambrose Akinmusire
I’m actually quite surprised that this song ended up being my favorite from the album. I tend to go for the crazier sounding jazz, and these guys do that very well. But something about this song is just magical to me. The harmonies in the beginning between the trumpet and the bowed upright bass are beautiful. And as the groove comes in, the subtle organ (I think) drone that looms behind everything sets a muted, celestial atmosphere. The harmony-melody interplay between the piano and trumpet generates so much emotion, and sets the stage for Akinmusire’s breathtaking Trumpet solo which comes eerily close to a human voice crying out in heartache.
The final seconds of the piece are quite odd actually in how it very briefly turns berserk, loud and avant-garde in a very deliberate way to close out the song. It’s like you’ve spent 5-minutes holding back the tears welling up in your eyes, and as the emotion reaches a boiling point, in a short moment of overwhelming grief, you burst out into a psychotic scream. And only then do you realize that by letting go of your inhibition like that, you’ve achieved the catharsis that you needed to let go and move on.
19. Spotlight - Jessie Ware
This song has an amazing balance of coolness and emotion. It starts off with a kind of movie soundtrack ballad opening, but then breaks into a totally funky synth bass groove. Then the chorus comes in and creates an incredibly sublime kind of contrast between the disco-ness and a sort of mysterious and longing sensation as she sings the lines “if only I could let you go / if only I could be alone”. The harmonic and melodic nature of the chorus is really beautiful, and I’m surprised at how fluidly it works with the disco undertones of the song. I don’t know how she gets so much passion out of those funky sounds but there’s some sort of unique trance that this song puts me in and I really dig it.
18. Omens - Elder
Elder have been doing 10+ minute songs for a long time, and they’re getting quite good at it. The composition on this track is absolutely stellar. This is probably the most beautiful manifestation of stoner rock I’ve ever heard. It’s not a genre that beauty is typically associated with, but they make such brilliant use of dynamics to build up emotion over the course of the song that I don’t know how else to describe it.
The song progresses in a powerfully linear fashion and every transition is seamless. I especially love the transition that comes in around the 7-minute mark, especially how they sort of fade in the beginning of the guitar solo as the other instruments transition into the next section. In fact, the whole rest of the song from that point on is just an extravaganza of epic riffs and guitar solos. This is really a song to get lost in, even if you’re not high, although you probably should be.
17. Heartless - The Weeknd
There is something kind of badass about how he storms into this song with the line “never need a bitch, I’m what a bitch needs” - a line that you can only get away with in a song that is, at least, tangentially within the realm of hip hop. It’s fascinating actually how, along with the rhythmic elements that he takes from rap, he also takes the often braggadocious nature of the genre’s lyrics.
I tend to not be so interested in such lyrics, but there’s an interesting juxtaposition going on when a guy with a voice as silky smooth and almost femininely high as him is singing lines like “so much pussy it be fallin’ out the pocket”.
It may seem shallow, but when he goes on in the chorus about his fame making him “heartless”, I think there’s some deeper self-reflection going on there. It’s like he’s struggling with the pull of that arrogance and how it affects his personal relationships. I mean it’s pretty obvious that that’s what he’s going for. The more interesting question I suppose would be whether he means it.
Who knows? That hook will get stuck in your head whether it’s got a deeper meaning or not, that’s for sure. But I do get a lot of emotion out of the song and it’s presented in a very nuanced way which makes it even cooler.
16. Carnival - Ashley Zarah
Despite it being a rather densely produced pop song, this track really brings a tear to my eye. The extended metaphor developed in the lyrics depicts a carnival animal “living inside a suitcase” and being degraded and abused, as you would expect an animal in that situation to be.
Even though it’s very metaphorical, the obvious personal implications hit really hard, partly because of Ashley Zarah’s deeply emotional inflection, but also because of lines like “They wanted something more / Another balance act to push to the floor / They wanted to make sure I was small”.
The chorus as well really hits me emotionally - I don’t wanna just end up quoting the whole song, so I’ll just say that the “Tryin’ to take a bite of my soul” line is where my eyes start watering up a little bit. And I love the choice to change it to “They wanna see me fight for my soul” the last time around, which gives the song an important tinge of resilience at the end.
15. Fallen Torches - Mastodon
Some of the most exciting words in the English language for me are “Mastodon just released a new song with Scott Kelly”. This may be Mastodon’s best attempt yet at balancing their somewhat newfound penchant for the melodic chorus against the visceral heaviness that defined them in their earlier years.
In fact, I really like the melodic vocal parts in this as they don’t seem forced or overly concerned with being catchy. Instead it sounds like they’re using their vocal melodies to indulge the darkness of the song. The counterpoint guitar melody in the chorus is very cool as well.
There’s so many classic Mastodon tropes going on here, each with a fresh spin. Brann Dailor’s drumming is aggressive and unrestrained right from the opening fill. Troy’s verse vocals sound as commanding as ever. The doomy Scott Kelly bridge fits perfectly into place. The transitions show just how mature Mastodon have become in their writing. And of course, what really sends this message home is how they beat you with a variation of that hectic main riff for a solid 40-seconds of much appreciated headbang-fodder at the end.
14. God is Perfect - Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist
I am fascinated by the chorus in this song. It’s a slightly melodic rap chorus, in that he raps a little higher than usual and hits a higher note at the end of every line. There’s a kind of whininess or squeakiness to his voice, which sounds totally unappealing as I write it, bt for some reason it sounds badass and kept me coming back to this song over and over again like a drug. It’s very rare that I end up being into a rap song for the chorus specifically so it was a bit of a treat for me.
Something interesting about rap: there are so many more words per minute than any other genre, so that if you actually do have a good chorus that makes you want to go back to the song after first listen, it opens up a ton of replay value for the listener. You can keep going back to the song for the chorus but every time you listen you’ll pick up something new from the verses. And there’s a ton to grab onto in the verses the way that Freddie Gibbs wrote them. That’s exactly what my experience with this track was.
13. The Longest Year - Kathleen
Maybe the most ‘timely’ song released for 2020 with its overtly poignant lyrical content. The song opens with some very clever wordplay: “The Great Barrier Reef was recently pronounced dead / Its last holy words were not: ‘Make america great again’”. There’s a sort of antsy nature to the vocals in the verses that contrast very powerfully against the “It’s been the longest year of our lives” chorus.
Something about the last few lyrical lines really seals the deal as this being a very powerful song for this moment: “Every other day we break another record / How many more 'till there's nothing left? / Oh, here we go again, into another longest year”. It just sort of seems like the last thing everyone should hear when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st, 2020.
12. ‘96 Neve Campbell - clipping.
How can you not love the creativity of the production on this one? Using that thunderous door knocking sound to portray the horror themes of the album is brilliant. But what amazes me is how incredibly catchy the song is as well. It’s rare you get a hip hop song this catchy that also has this kind of sublimely creative production. Not to mention that Cam & China absolutely kill their verses.
In some sense, the production is very sparse. But the sparseness really evokes a sort of isolation and fear, and the cool intensity of the rappers sounds like they’re representing whatever is on the other side of that door that keeps knocking. Somehow the sparseness itself provides the setting for a very evocative, ominous tone. And for some reason I just really love the hook line “Come in talkin’ that shit, and you gonna have to die about it”. Something about the phrasing of that being denotatively threatening yet also very colloquial really ties the themes of the song together in a genius way.
11. Now it Ends - Leeched
Goddamn. The tones on this song make it sound like it was recorded in some massive steel fortress as the whole thing burned to the ground. I mean, they literally use a repeating emergency-alarm esque sound throughout the whole song, so you can see why I get that impression. It’s just so fucking heavy. I’ll admit it does get a bit grating going on for the whole album, and I hope that they add a few more dynamics and switch up the tones on future releases. But just for a few minutes of absolutely destructive futuristic heaviness, this track is perfect. And when it slows down for a moment around two-minutes in and briefly teases you with ambient eeriness before returning to heaviness - that’s one of the most intense musical moments of the year for sure.
10. my future - Billie Eilish
I do hope that Billie Eilish doubles down on making dark and antagonistic pop music, but she really subverted my expectations in a pleasant way with this track. This isn’t dark at all really. In fact, it’s quite airy and heartfelt. There’s even a bit of funk going on here after the soulful and jazzy intro. I really love the part where the beat drops out and she sings “But I know better / Than to drive you home”, and then that tight drum groove comes back in.
This is really exciting because although I love her darkness, I’m happy to give Billie and her producer brother a lot more overall credit and just buy into whatever it is they want to do as artists. They clearly have a wide range of creative potential, not just in terms of style and production, but also just as formidable songwriters. The lyrics in this song, particularly, “Cause I, I'm in love with my future / Can't wait to meet her / And I, I'm in love / But not with anybody else / Just wanna get to know myself”, I think are brilliant. It’s really a subtle anthem for the introvert. And like it or not, we were all introverts in 2020, so a song like this couldn’t have been timed more perfectly.
9. Jurassic | Cretaceous - The Ocean
“Out, out of the cave!” is probably my favorite singular lyric line of the year, and the intense delivery of it within the context of the song doesn’t hurt at all. Neither does the brass section that comes in with the drum groove at 30 seconds to set the tone of this gargantuan composition. This song does really ebb and flow into different parts over it’s 13-minute run time, but each part is totally memorable, and as a whole the song feels both much shorter than 13-minutes and also very consistent in tone.
In fact, the songwriting, namely the reintroduction of different motifs and parts throughout the track, is very well done. Normally a long song like this would either suffer from drawing out one vibe for too long or changing vibes and styles too often in an attempt to keep things fresh, but ultimately resulting in a lack of cohesion. This is a rare example of an epic composition that suffers from neither of those issues. It truly justifies its length; not even speaking to the extent to which the title aids in that justification.
And the ebb and flow between atmospheric and heavy parts gives it such a thematic feel of passing periods of time, which obviously serves the greater meaning of the music as well as its length. It’s hard to live up to that title but as far as I’m concerned they did just that.
8. To Live and Die in A.D. - Avantdale Bowling Club
A live jazz rap song, with a great horn melody, fantastic drumming, and a crazy free jazz ending. I’m so glad that they included this one totally new song for this live album. Great, sort of casually existential lyrics like, “Good people, fresh water, clean air / I don’t need heaven I’m already here” fit perfectly with the live energy of the music. I mean, just the fact that this is a live jazz song with a free jazz outro means it was meant to be one of my favorite songs of the year. These guys are pushing rap into a totally new direction in a relatively simple way by mixing it with real jazz music like this, and I just want more and more of it.
7. Dispossession - Algiers
When Algiers put all their passion into a song it just feels like the sonic equivalent of a molotov cocktail. The verses in this one have such an urgency to them - it feels like you’re running from the authorities, especially with lines like, “Here they come back again from the shadows / From the jaws of the beast, / Here they come from the pages of infinity / Shaking what you believe”. That is Algiers sort of bread and butter and I love it. The chorus in this song is quite unique however as it features a female vocal choir going back and forth with the lead singer as he produces some James Brown-esque highs. The fact that the verses sound like you’re running, and the chorus choir repeats the line “You can’t run away” is why this song comes together so effectively for me.
I also really like it at the end of the bridge where he sort of abandons the rhyme scheme and sort of recklessly blurts out the mouthful of a line,”We are the blade and the groove that come together / We are the rain and the fire that's coming down”. It’s weird because the placement of that line is a little awkward rhythmically and distinctly non-rhyming, but that somehow makes it seem much more powerful and important. It’s almost like a brief moment of revolutionary poetry. That’s a very counterintuitive songwriting tactic but that fact that it works makes it very intense.
It shouldn’t be surprising I suppose, given their against the grain-aesthetic. They rebel against all authority including the oppressive rules of songwriting. And the artistic fruits that they reap from that rebellion produces consistently moving, genre-defying music that I can’t get enough of.
6. Break My Heart - Dua Lipa
Just the epitome of an undeniably catchy pop song. The funkyness is irresistible. The ability to weave in an emotionally powerful bridge is top-tier songwriting, and I can’t understate how effective it is at setting up the rapid groove of the chorus. Anyone trying to write pop music should listen to this song and learn a lesson about how the rhythm of a vocal hook can contribute as much to it’s catchiness as the melody and chords. No matter how hard I tried I just could not pull myself away from that chorus. It’s too bad the bridge is so thoughtless; if they had put something more substantial in between the second and third chorus this song would be absolutely perfect. Just a great sax solo even could have made this my favorite song of the year, honestly.
5. Ara Resurrected - Tigran Hamasyan
I couldn't help but be drawn to the longest track on this album. With all the twists and turns that Hamasyan incorporates into these songs, the one that ends up standing out most for me is the track that is most fundamentally defined in its structure by that sort of calculated instability. The way he habitually switches between lighter and heavier incarnations of the same motifs to build up the intensity makes it seem like you’re descending deeper and deeper into the darkest depths of your own mind. Everytime you pass into a new layer, he offers you a few moments of jazzy-serenity, before throwing you back into the dissonant oblivion. It’s a bipolar, dark jazz epic and it’s probably the most harrowing singular experience you could have had with a composition in 2020.
4. The Valley - Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou
This is the song in 2020 that took me the longest to realize that I love. And now that I know, I feel like it gets more emotional everytime I listen. Emma Ruth Rundle has one of my favorite voices - everything she sings sounds totally gut wrenching to me. The first half of this song sounds a lot like her solo material, hypnotically mellow and atmospheric. It’s a really a great sort of dreamy folk song in it’s own right before it changes in the second half; the way the chorus opens up when she sings “And to you who've given up in the valley” is angelic and wistful.
But the way it builds up into a dramatic sludge metal ending with the harsh vocalist from Thou doubling her vocals is just sublime. It’s interesting how she follows the guitars with her voice as it starts to get heavier in the middle, and how she allows her melodies to take on a more disagreeable nature in mimicry. It really helps to set up the even darker turn to come.
Even though it’s a rather unorthodox pairing, the gradual 7-minutes of anticipation and slow, marching evolution into heaviness makes the big moment where the feedback kicks in and Thou finally make their presence known feel so overwhelmingly climactic and emotional, in a rather darkly euphoric way. And wow, that “get them out of my way” line that they repeat throughout the ending embeds a heartened defiance onto the overall meaning of the song.
There are also some very celtic-sounding strings that weave in and out of the track and add even more depth to the atmosphere of the song while also helping to set the vibe that’s implied by the title. It’s quite the experience all together and I’m so glad that I get to hear ERR in a context like this. The Valley is all about emotional suspense, tension and climax. Give it a few tries and see if you can’t connect with it in the way that I did.
3. Me Miras Pero No Me Ves - María José Llergo
Flamenco music naturally has a lot of harmonic suspense to it and the looming entrance of the massive 12/8 sub bass groove makes this song into such a powerful exercise in tension and release. It’s interesting how she uses the consistent hand clapping in this song to maximize the dynamic between parts without losing the tempo of the song, since the clapping keeps rhythm but still feels acoustic alongside the guitar and vocals. Then when the groove hits it doesn’t feel like it came out of nowhere.
And on top of that the groove itself has a very tense and unconventional pulse for a ‘pop’ song. In fact, it doesn’t really feel like a pop song. Call it what you will. It really captures the spirit and intensity of actual flamenco music well satisfying a modern itch of electronic sub bass heaviness.
And what do I say about the vocals? The riffing and layers that she adds in the end are emotionally overwhelming in the best way. And the way the bass comes in again near the end never fails to make me wanna move.
2. Newspaper - Fiona Apple
First and foremost, this song demonstrates how much of a vocal force of nature Fiona Apple is. The bluesy raspiness she engages on the “You're wearing time, like a flowery crown” section (especially the last time she sings it) makes me shake my head in disbelief everytime time that I hear it. I assume she’s not, but she sounds like she’s tearing up her voice with passion. The “sitting that big cat down” line in particular sounds so badass the way she sings it.
The song also has a really nuanced narrative and meaning lyrically in the way that it details a sense of empathy with a women who is experiencing abuse from a man whom the narrator was once abused by, and how the abuser has “[made] sure that [they’ll] never be friends'' by lying to the woman who he’s with now.
There’s something super interesting about the arrangement of this song in that I can’t detect any non-percussion instruments except the vocals. But there’s a ton of percussion going on so the song doesn’t feel stripped down at all. It kind of feels like an American slave spiritual in this respect, which I’m not sure if she intended, but it has some interesting artistic relevance given the lyrical content. Anyhow, what I can say certainly is that this sort of percussion and a cappella arrangement gives this song a very intense bite to it, as if her vocals didn’t do that enough. Put simply, this Fiona Apple song is heavy as fuck.
And just looking at this song as a whole: it’s got arguably the most powerful vocal performance of the year, arguably the most creative arrangement of a song, and arguably the most nuanced lyrical undertaking. You can see why I like it so much.
1. Human Nature - Sevdaliza
This song is a seeming contradiction. It starts with a simple electronic beat, incorporates the most interesting use of autotune to manipulate and extend the tonal range of the voice I’ve ever heard, transitions into a beautifully intense and heart-stopping violin solo, and concludes with the words “human nature” sung in haunting repetition.
It sounds like a strange mix on paper. But all you need to do is listen to the violin solo, and you’ll know why this is such a standout for me. The way the violinist builds up into a highpoint of total emotive ecstasy and then seemingly loses control and allows that beauty to fall at its highest moment with that sudden slipping out of key is enough in and of itself to fix a spot on this list.
Add in the artistically imposed clash of themes between the human and inhuman, and the innovative vocal production, and you have yourself an unforgettable song. By using both production techniques and legitimate musical techniques to stretch the concept of what sounds natural and what sounds beautiful, Sevdaliza turns the song into a sort of microcosm of itself; raising questions about human nature and offering answers within the same breath.
You hear the autotune come in at the start and you wonder why she’s making this artistic choice. Then you hear it pushing her voice into completely alien territory that would otherwise be inaccessible, and you realize that there’s something powerful and forward thinking about how she’s using it. Then the familiar sound of the violin comes in with it’s human-like cries, only to dismantle itself and abandon that beauty at the end via a ‘wrong’ note. Then as she sings “human nature”, the point of all these choices comes into perspective.
It’s a 200,000 year-long homo sapien story condensed into 4 minutes of sound. This song is about me and you on the most fundamental level. By the time you get to the end, it feels like the elegy for the human species as observed from some alien narrator. In a year where we were all visceral confronted with the existential fragility of our civilization, there couldn’t be a more fitting song.
(Top 25 Songs Playlist on Spotify)
Honorable Mention Songs of 2020 (bolds were really close):
half return - Adrianne Lenker
God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It - Backxwash
Holy Silence - Black Crown Initiate
Roots of Blue - Blue & Exile
Eyes Beseeching, Hands Gagged - Brian Krock
Autumn - Caligula’s Horse
Cold - Chris Stapleton
Genesis - Deftones
The Beauty Of - Eleanor Elektra
A Long Way Past the Past - Fleet Foxes
Hjulet - GAUPA
Speaking of Orbs - Intronaut
Heart Set to Divide - Katatonia
The Hungry Wolf of Fate - King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
La maison jaune - Klô Pelgag
It’s Hard to Be Human - Lawrence Rothman & Marisa Nadler
Quando Eu Era Pequenina - Lina_Raül Refree
The Fall of SIHEYMN - Liturgy
Stranger Than Fiction - Moses Boyd
Feel the Buzz - Ninet Tayeb
Apocalyptical - Puscifer
Dynasty - Rina Sawayama
Juro Que - Rosalía
Butterfly - Slow Dress
Summoning the Monkey God - The Sorcerers
Consumed - Sumac
Genocidal Humanoidz - System of a Down
my tears ricochet - Taylor Swift
Inversion - Ulcerate
Trust No One - Zeal & Ardor
2020 Superlatives:
2020 All-Star Band: (i.e. My Favorite Individual Performances)
*Vocals/Guitar/Bass/Drums/and one other instrumentalist of my choice
Vocals: Fiona Apple
Guitar: Plini
Bass: Neil Innes (The Sorcerers)
Drums: Justin Brown (Ambrose Akinmusire)
Piano: Tigran Hamasyan
Riff/Motif of the Year: Levitation 21 (Tigran Hamasyan)
Solo of the Year: uncredited musician (violin solo in Human Nature - Sevdaliza)
Chorus/Hook of the Year: Break My Heart - Dua Lipa
Best Lyrical Song: The Beauty Of - Eleanor Elektra
Best Album Art: Shore - Fleet Foxes
*Selected very much based on the relevancy of the art to the music, i.e., how much the art enhances the music
Best Sounding/Produced Album: Visions of Bodies Being Burned - clipping.
2020 Wrap-Up: Female Vocalists, 80’s Revival, and Existentialism
Immediately apparent to me, reviewing my choices for 2020, is how feminine it all is. My top four songs of the year were all female-vocal songs, and of course my #1 and #3 albums were female-vocal albums (and #2 was instrumental). Songs like my #2 song of the year, Fiona Apple’s Newspaper, as well as much of the other music on her album, are distinctively, topically feminine. And my #1 album of the year was in many ways, lyrically, a personification of ‘mother’ nature. This is a trend that I’ve noticed in my preferences these past few years but this is the first year I’ve felt a sort of dominance in the quality of female-voiced music. Funnily enough, on my highest ranking male-voiced album, Visions of Bodies Being Burned, my favorite song (‘96 Neve Campbell) was a song named after a woman and featuring two female rappers.
It’s also been very obvious this year that the late 70’s and 80’s are coming back strong. Extremely popular artists like Dua Lipa, The Weeknd and Miley Cyrus didn’t hold back at all in their invoking of disco and synthpop, and Jessie Ware and Róisín Murphy weren’t far behind. Even Billie Eilish incorporated a bit of funk into my future, and it’s crossing over into rock bands like Algiers and Pusicfer.
I alluded to this throughout, but I do want to point out again just how much value I got out of music with existential themes. Both my album of the year and song of the year were explicitly invested in the relationship between humanity and nature, and what is natural; more externally in Eleanor Elektra’s case and internally in Sevdaliza’s. This sort of subject matter is more common in rock and metal music, like on Puscifer’s and The Ocean’s albums, but not so much in some other genres, so it’s exciting to hear it cropping up in pop, folk and jazz.
I don’t need to tell anyone how extra-relevant these sorts of themes seemed in 2020. But what I really hope for is that these existential themes keep becoming more prominent and aren’t just a novelty of the pandemic. A lot of great jazz and classical music has been inspired by religious ideas throughout history, so as our societies become more secular, I feel that there’s a need for more music that tries to grapple with existence, mortality and the human condition on a deeper, nuanced level in the way that a number of artists did this year. 2020 could be a turning point in which we all acknowledge the need for art that can articulate and address the uncertainty of our experience, the frailty of our civilization, etc.
A lot of people will seek a silver lining to this year on a socio-political level; something about us awakening to the problems we face as a species and the need to be prepared for emergencies like COVID-19. But strictly focusing on music, there’s a similar sort of silver lining. We’ve always turned to art to help us cope with heartbreak, failure, loss, war, etc. We’re going to need it to help us cope with this weird and unstable future that awaits us as technological advances increase exponentially and society evolves at more and more of a rapid pace. Not to be over-dramatic, but if our art doesn’t keep pace with these changes, I do think that there’s an extent to which that puts us at more risk.
I’m not calling for all artists to start getting more political per se. What I’m saying is that artists like Eleanor Elektra, like Sevadliza, like Puscifer, who use art not to change your opinion in one particular way, but rather to make you think bigger and outside of yourself, are fundamentally important to humanity. We can only ignore the implications of our ever-improving scientific understanding of reality and ever-changing societies so much. Art can’t necessarily give us the answers, but it can provide us with a much needed catharsis by framing our existential issues in ways that we can identify with emotionally and personally.
Or maybe 2020 just hit me very hard existentially and I really needed this music. I don’t know. Maybe when the pandemic is over everyone will just want breakup songs and party anthems to distract and forget. That’s ok, too. But for me, I’m excited to see what music can do to fill in the metaphysical gaps that the turmoil of 2020 has revealed for many of us; not just as an eschatological soundtrack, but rather as a tool for us to confront reality in the way that art has always been there for us to use.
Thanks for reading! What are your favorite albums of the year? Songs? All-Star Bands? Let me know!
