2019 in Progressive and Interesting Music: Top 25 Albums, Top 25 Songs, 2019 All-Star Band and Superlatives

Ah, the end of a decade. It's just another year, but everything seems so much more important. I had to resist the urge to end every one of these album reviews with phrases like, 'looking forward to the next decade', or things of that nature.

It was four years ago in 2016 that I made my first one of these, and I feel like I'm really starting to perceive trends in music, as innovation sprouts in certain genres, stagnates in others, and as I try to weigh that movement against my own ever-changing tastes. This year was difficult in some ways because a lot of big names (for me personally and in general) released music, and as I become more invested in sharing my opinions on the modern musical canon, it becomes increasingly difficult to measure the work of bands for whom I've developed high expectations, against the newer groups, or groups that I've never heard of, who come out with something amazing out of nowhere. It just goes to show how arbitrary this ranking albums and songs thing is.

I should stop writing now before I undermine all the work I just put into this project. 2019 had some amazing music from a wide variety of genres - hope you find some new favorites!

Follow the Nomadic Ear on instagram/facebook

Top 25 Songs of 2019 Spotify Playlist

Note:  If you wanna get straight to the rankings and don't want to suffer through my thoughts and ramblings on each album, feel free to scroll down to the bottom where I've neatly listed my top 25 albums and songs of the year, along with my 2019 all-star band and superlatives. I do tend to mention other great albums and songs that didn't make the cut throughout my post when relevant however (those album names are bolded), so you might miss out on something good!

Top 25 Albums of 2019:

25. Leprous - Pitfalls

I think some bands almost thrive on deliberately alienating their fan base. Leprous must know at this point how unhappy a significant contingency of the people who really revere their work in the first half of the decade are with the new direction they've moved towards with every release.

I'm a little torn myself. A lot of people hold up the sophomore 2011 album Bilateral as their magnus opus, an album that, unique as it was, was much more committed to a progressive and avant-garde metal sound. For me, their peak was on their 2015 album The Congregation, which caught them at a midpoint between the more pop influenced modern era and their original heaviness. It was such a creative balance of infectious vocal hooks and frigid, tight modern metal.

Their last album, 2017's Malina, was the first album that felt distinctly less heavy. For some, that was a major point of criticism. Me? I named it the #11 best album of the year. It didn't appeal to me as much as The Congregation, but I did really appreciate the creative, sort of symphonic and more colorful direction they were taking things. All things being equal, I just felt that the album that preceded it had a little better, more consistent songwriting. I didn't have any principle problem with the direction.

I'm generally someone that likes to hear bands experiment and change. I don't want to hear the same thing. The risk that's run, is that just because you're good at writing one kind of music, it doesn't mean you'll be good a writing another. Sometimes when bands change over time, it's difficult to maintain their previous quality because they feel they've exhausted the sound that made them great. You have to play to your creative strengths as an artist. 

And so, being a bit lower on my list this year, you might expect me to say that the popier and even less heavy sound that Leprous have established on this new album is missing the heaviness that makes them great, and that the pop elements are not their strength.

It's the opposite. Leprous have written some fantastic heavy music, but what has caught my ear ever since The Congregation has been a great sense of melody and use of hooks. Their pop elements have always been the most appealing aspect of their sound to me (well, that and the drumming - ever since they added the incredible Baard Kolstad on the kit from that album onward).

The most exciting sounds on this album, to me, are songs like I Lose Hope and Observe the Train. Both feature very little guitar at all, and represent the freshest incarnation of the Leprous sound, with their very subtle, unheavy electronic basis. I mentioned this on their last album, but the mix of electronic and symphonic sounds reminds me of Radiohead, although as they get popier, it's starting to remind me more of Björk (also maybe because as they get softer they start to sound a little bit more Nordic).

Even back on the The Congregation, though it was a  metal album, it was not so much the guitar riffs that drew me in. It was more about the rhythms and vocal melodies, and if I remember correctly, vocalist and keyboardist Einar Solberg wrote all the music for those songs on keyboard first and then had the guitarists adapt them to their instruments. Even then, with guitars still ever-present in the music, that unique writing approach was something that really distinguished the direction of their compositions.

Oppositely to how most bands choose to present a change in direction, Leprous put most of the more extreme experiments in varying their sounds at the beginning of the record and stack the more 'traditional' sounding Leprous tracks at the end. I like this - it's bold and shows that the experimentation isn't an afterthought.

The penultimate track Foreigner is the most by the numbers Leprous track on the album, sounding very much like it could've been released back in 2015. It starts of with some cool guitar tones, but this track makes it obvious to me that what they shouldn't be doing is trying to replicate their own sound, as this track is my least favorite on the record, and feels a bit uninspired relative to the rest of the album, like a fodder track for fans who like the old stuff. I'm not saying it's intentionally written with that level of dispassion, it just doesn't feel like what they're excited about.

The final track, The Sky is Red, I feel quite a bit differently about. It's a much heavier and progressive track but also one of the album's best moments. And it's a long moment, clocking in at almost eleven and a half minutes. It's really a showcase of the two things that I've loved about Leprous' past work other than their pop elements, which are unconventional yet groovy rhythms, manifested in the first half of the song, and their penchant for huge and heavy endings.

And the ending of this one is so heavy; goddamn. This part is end-of-world-sounding epic. It's one of their heaviest moments ever, and I love how they layer in different mellotron-esque choral samples over the riff as it goes on. This ending is a genius arrangement all together, and the way they bring in the bass and heavy synth first and delay the entrance of the guitars is so effective. The guitars also just sound awesome throughout this song tonally - I shouldn't discount how important of a factor they are in the Leprous sound.

I think that if you put this on the end of The Congregation, not only would it fit, but it would be a lot of people's favorite Leprous song. The more I listen to it, the more I'm considering it too. It's funny because I don't think I really appreciated this song as much I should've at first because of how surprising it was given the context of the album, but I'm thinking now this song is one of their greastest accomplishments, in the way it capitalizes on all their strengths and then takes it home so forcefully at the end.  

I do really like the idea of ending an album which is audaciously poppy with a huge and heavy epic like this, and if they had done an album featuring only a couple of long, progressive tracks like this I would probably really like that a lot too. A song like this really plays to their strengths because of it's unrestrained compositional ambition.

Part of it of course is how much of an exciting drummer Baard is, so on a song like this he's really allowed to shine. He's somewhat underutilized on the popier songs that I mentioned before but I don't mind it because I like those songs. But if they are going to do something heavier then the more they incorporate him and his unique rhythmic approach the better.

So it seems like the zone that Leprous thrives in creatively is when they're really committed to a sound. You'll notice that I say things like this a lot when I'm reviewing music, but that's because it's usually true, and with Leprous especially. I think I can hear what kind of ideas they're really passionate about creating when I listen to their music.

The songs that most represent what this album sounds like in general are the sort of climactic, quasi-heavy symphonic ballads that call back the sound of their previous album somewhat. Songs like Below and Distant Bells, rely heavily on Leprous' pure emotional power. On both these songs, Einar provides a magnificent vocal performance, not just because of his unmistakable heart-wrenching belts, but also because of the emotionally striking amount of restraint he exhibits with his voice during the softest parts, something I feel that he deliberately worked on and incorporated more so on this record with the foresight that they were going to try some more stripped down soundscapes that would be greatly enhanced by this type of vocal dynamic discipline.

There's a bit of cheesiness to these songs that hold them back from greatness for me. I'm on board with the chorus of Below, but also every time he sings the line "Will it last forever?" it takes me out of things a little bit, and I also can't help but lament the fact that they adopt a bit of a lazier songwriting format and bring back the chorus a third time without much variation after a bridge that's barely different from the post-chorus theme that occurs every other time the chorus happens (typically I've really enjoyed their habit of only repeating their chorus' twice and often opting for a coda instead of a bridge). Even something predictable for a bridge like a melodic guitar solo or a stripped down verse would make things a lot better here, though I know they're capable of something much more creative.

So picky, I know. But I get the impression a little but that in their foray into pop music they've sort of decided that being cheesy doesn't matter. Good for them but... it should a little bit. At least to me.

I'm almost inclined to blame this lack of discretion on the overly critical fans who don't like their new direction. When people so adamantly reject your new direction, you can develop almost too thick of a skin, and it can be hard to be properly critical of your art yourself; a sort of mentality like, 'these people just hate what we're doing now, so anything that they would hate is good'.

I mean, it's still up there as one of my favorite songs of the year - I love the string arrangement and the way that the wobbly synths set the tone at the beginning is one of the best album openings of 2019. But it's just one of those things where I can't completely invest in it, and when you have such emotionally charged music, that kind of hesitation is a big problem for me in really connecting with the song.

It's a shame because based on the first nearly six minutes of Distant Bells, it should be my favorite song on the record. It's one of the most moving mixes of raw emotion and intensely atmospheric harmonic arrangements I've heard this year. But the last minute and a half really bugs me. I remember first listening to it and being blown away up til that point, and then thinking 'Oh, come on! Don't be that predictable!', and then as the ending continued, screaming in my head, 'No! Not an anthemic section of woo's!'

The contrast between the ending of the song and the rest is so stark that I would go as far as to say that this song would be in contention for one of my favorite songs of the year even if they'd just awkwardly ended the song after the build up that leads into the end. Not because that's what I think they should've done specifically, but I would have respected the artistic anti-climax of something like that much more than the curiously and uncharacteristically uninventive way they actually chose to end it.

I do like the song At the Bottom a lot, which is similar to these two with it's expansive dramatic songwriting. The orchestral build up towards the end is really fleshed out and epic. I don't have any particular problems with this song, but the parts I like about the other two tracks like it, I like a lot better, so I feel like we still never get that one amazing, dramatic, symphonic song that Leprous are capable of on this record.

I'm getting into a bit of an overly critical mood writing this now, which is incredibly hypocritical because a few paragraphs ago I essentially blamed the things that I don't like about this album on people who are overly critical of Leprous... 

So I understand where the criticism is coming from and I also understand what Leprous are trying to do with their music now. Like I said, I think that they're strength now is in further experimenting with these pop and electronic elements. The real points of contention I have are where it seems like they're trying to be catchy but they still want to be a guitar based band. They've got plenty of guitar-based material to play live at this point. They don't need to worry about that.

My endgame for Leprous is them pulling at mid-late 60's Beatles move and just not thinking at all about how their studio recordings will reflect the format of their band. That's a sign of the utmost respect from me. That means I value their artistry so much I want them to leave the style that I'm most naturally engaged by (guitar-based rock) just so I can hear the fruits of their totally uninhibited creativity. So even though I join in on the criticism a bit, my main takeaway from this album is that Leprous have just about as high a potential as any band out there right now, and I haven't by any means lost hope that we'll see that potential realized in full at some point as they continue to progress and challenge their fans to keep up with them.

If Leprous just aren't progressive enough for you now, and you want to start following another Norwegian progressive metal band with great drumming, complex rhythms, and mostly clean singing, I actually have a pretty good recommendation and that is an album called As the Waters Cover the Sea by Umpfel. More than Leprous, I'd compare these guys in sound to modern Between the Buried and Me, but they're probably taking influence from a variety of modern prog metal bands like Tesseract and Intronaut, for example. Plus there's a lot of jazz influence going on and just great musicianship in general. The song Shofar features one of my favorite guitar solos of the year before breaking into an awesome chromaticy riff near the end, plus has some really good vocals that waver fluidly between clean and harsh. The song Sphere of War is your best bet if you really missed Baard's drumming on that Leprous album as my favorite part is the nasty drum solo they use to transition into the final section of the song.

And if you want more chorus-based prog metal that's a little bit heavier than the new Leprous album, you may try (and might have already heard of) the new Soen album, Lotus. There's some really heavy stuff on here, such as the opening track, Opponent, which starts the album off explosively with it's aggressive riffage, and also the next song Lascivious, which showcases some of their best and most dynamic songwriting, with some very powerful singing. Even though they're not really progressing their sound very far beyond their last album on this one (I'm sure some of the people disappointed with the new Leprous album will appreciate that), I will say that they've really got their particular 'thrashy-Opeth' riff-writing style down to a damn science at this point and it's pretty impressive how they can just pump those distinct riffs out with consistent quality. They've certainly developed very far from their first two records in that sense.

24. Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky - Droneflower

It's hard to describe albums in one word but this album title does about the best job I could think of. Nadler and Brodsky, bring different styles to the table, but I think that they're vision for how those styles should mesh is very coherent, and that's why this album works. Marissa Nadler brings her folk/Americana/singer-songwriter stylings and Brodsky brings an influence from drone music.

For what this album is, there's a lot of diversity, ranging from outright singer-songwriter tracks to extremely ominous, rather heavy pieces. The first song to include vocals, For the Sun, starts things off on the heavier side. It's a sort of dark folk song with a pounding, distorted electric guitar marching along in lockstep as Nadler sings "I wanna love you but I don't know how". It's a good signal for the Marissa Nadler fans that this thing's gonna be different. In fact, that quote is probably what a lot of them are thinking about the music when they first hear it.

Structurally, I really like how they stack the less droney stuff at the end, as if the darkness is receding along the way. Both the drone-devoid acoustic singer-songwriter tracks are in the second half of the album. The final track, In Spite of Me, is a bona fide Nashville-sounding singer-songwriter song. Aside from a slight dark cynicism to it in the lyrics, it's a contrastingly bright tune in the album's context. Same goes for the song Shades Apart, which has some great southern sounding acoustic guitar along with some very airy, reverby vocals. Even the atmospheric instrumental interlude in the second half, Morbid Mist, is much folkier and brighter than the dark, lost-in-space type interludes in the first half. I think that these songs would feel out of place if the album was organized differently, but instead it feels like a clear progression into the light.

But the most compelling parts of this project are the songs with the most mix between the two styles. Dead West has a great acoustic guitar theme to it, but despite the southern feel, it's made quite eerie by the cavernously reverb-drenched vocals - reminding me a bit of Chelsea Wolfe.

The real gem on this album however is the song Estranged, which stands out quite boldly in the middle of the tracklisting at nearly seven and a half minutes, more than twice the length of any other song. They really outdid themselves on every aspect of this song. It has the best chord progressions on the album, the best lyrics, the best harmonies... Even just the way it comes in immediately with the vocals, with the very memorable line, "You're talking to yourself when nobody's home" is one of my favorite starts to a song this year. It's in the context of such an excellently written song like this the added production elements of Stephen Brodsky make a huge difference. As this one feels both, not just like an experiment in combining different styles, and not just like another folk song, but rather an epic Americana ballad with a sublime atmosphere.

Sometimes when you have collaborations or experiments in genre-blending like this, they get old a little fast. But this record is so short - under 32 minutes - that there's no issue with that. And in fact, there's a good amount of instrumental/atmospheric interludes as well, so this whole things seems very conscious of it's own possibly fleeting novelty. And I don't mean to say that it is fleeting, or that it gets close to being overdone by the end, I just like that they made a very concise experiment like this. It makes it feel more like a genuine 'this is what happens when these artists meet' sort of thing. Or in other words, there's a sensation of spontaneity to it, and because it's partly a singer-songwriter album, that spontaneity has an honesty to it.

It's always great to get these sort of unexpected albums and see how artists mesh. Sometimes they don't work but sometimes they do, and we get something totally unique. If I want to listen to a folk album but it's late at night in the dead of winter, I now have the perfect option. That's enough reason to hope for more collaborations from these two, and from everyone out there doing unique things with music. Throw things you wouldn't expect to go together against the wall, and let's see what unique things can be created.

One group that's sort of been taking on that mentality for a while is the Russian duo iamthemorning, who translate classical piano foundations into sort of avant-garde singer-songwriter songs. Somehow, this group has long been accepted within the prog rock scene. How? I don't know. But that's how I found them so I'm okay with it. On their new album, The Bell, they actually try to interject some more prog rock-type instrumentation on a few songs. I still like the more stripped down and melancholic songs the best though, and I'd recommend the song Lilies, which may stand out at first for the notably rapid piano theme, but really sticks with me cuz of the beautiful vocal melodies and harmonies in the chorus, and the chord changes that the piano player moves between underneath, not to mention the piano solo at the end.

23. Sâver - They Came With Sunlight

There were a lot of sludge/post-metal albums released this year by prominent bands, but as often happens, it was a young and hungry band's debut album that really caught my attention.

It's not that they're breaking any new ground for the genre on this release. This is a sludge metal album through and through, heavily indebted to the Neurosis blueprint. In fact, the singer even sounds a lot like the legendary Neurosis frontman Scott Kelly when he's screaming. But Neurosis hasn't been this heavy since the late 90's and metal production has come a long way since then, so to have something that really scratches that same itch but with a bit more of an updated sound to it is perfectly welcome in my opinion.

Listen to the goddamn bass in the first half of the song Dissolve to Ashes. I'm pretty impressed with the sound they're getting here since this is a debut record. It sounds absolutely massive, and I love how they let it groove for a while with the drums before bringing in the guitar, so you can really just sulk in the sheer density of it. It makes me wonder if they used some studio magic to really fatten it up, because even when it's isolated from the guitars in this way it feels freakishly heavy. Not saying that they are - just curious.

I tried looking up a live video of them to see if they're using 5-string basses/7-string guitars, to help explain this uncanny heaviness, and fuck me, the guitarist is playing a fucking Stratocaster...

There are some genres where you need to really push things in an innovative direction to get my attention. But I think that a genre like sludge is based so simply on the quality of ideas that when you get a band that executes like this it's so easy for me to jump on board with them, i.e. good riffs make me bang my head.

Take a song like I, Vanish. This song starts off so groovy; just a tight as hell locked in rhythm between the high-hat based grind of the drums and the percussive and strongly articulated palm-muting riff of the guitars. They break into this groove immediately; no guitar intro, drum fill, build-up or anything.  With this bold beginning, I get a sensation in the first few seconds of the song that I just woke up in the middle of a raging battle; immediately transported into a war zone with no time to think about how. There' a confidence to the way they do this. This part doesn't need no introduction. Just hit them with it straight away. You can't do that with any riff but when you've got a riff like this its the perfect way to start.

I will say too, in addition to the individual quality of the riffs on this song, I also have a lot of reverence for the whole composition. The transitions from part to part for the whole thing are flawless. Sometimes a song like this could sound like a bunch of riffs in the same key and tempo thrown together one after the other, and honestly, a lot of the time that's well and good for this type of music. But this way this one unfolds is noticeably well-designed. I love how the break into another bass and drum groove halfway into the song, which seems to be a sort of trademark move for them. And I love even more how they incorporate the vocals over one of these guitar-less sections too, as it leaves a lot of space for his earth-shattering screams to take center to stage before the guitars come back in.

It's not a short song, clocking in at just over seven minutes, but its the shortest track besides the (sort of) interlude track Influx, and I think the tighter composition really makes the song hit hard. It's funny how on an album that averages ten-minute songs that a seven minute track can feel like the concise song well simultaneously being long enough to build up into this kind of gargantuan climax.

My tastes can be pretty simple sometimes. Give me good sludgey riffs like this with fat production and Neurosis-esque roars and I'm good. Even if the bass just sounds like it does here on their next release you can count me in no questions asked; that is, if I can even still hear after being unable to resist turning this heavy-ass shit up every time I listen to it. I love the sound they're getting on this LP but damn I'm gonna annihilate my eardrums if bands like this keep killing it with these massive ten-minute sludge bangers. Come on guys. I mean, don't stop, but...

Sâver weren't the only band releasing great sludgey music in 2019 however, and though theirs was my favorite release of that nature, a number of important bands in the genre put out some good material as well.

SUMAC collaborated wtih Keiji Haino again this year for another sludgey, experimental album of free improvisation titled, Even for just the briefest moment Keep charging this "expiation" Plug in to making it slightly better. They really nailed the live recording sound on this one. A challenging listen once again but also infinitely interesting, musically inspiring and groundbreaking for the metal in general.

Sludge/post-metal pioneers Cult of Luna came out with an album called A Dawn to Fear. I loved their previous 2016 album in which they collaborated with singer Julie Christmas. I thought that was a really forward-thinking post-metal album. No collaboration on this one, so it grabbed my attention a little less, but nonetheless I've always really enjoyed the style, and I love the very nefarious atmosphere on the song Nightwalkers. It's a dense album - almost 80 minutes - and a lot to consume which is part of the reason why I think it didn't make my list. But it's certainly worth investing the time in if you like sprawling, atmospheric sludge compositions.

More firmly in the post-metal category, Russian Circles released a new album called Blood Year. These guys always put out high-quality stuff. My favorite track is the very intense composition Milano. This is also just a fantastic sounding heavy record, especially the drums.

And my favorite post-metal band, Latitudes, came out with a new album as well. After coming out with what was probably my favorite post-metal album of the decade in 2016, I had high expectations their new release. Part Island is a little bit different for them. The vocals are much more present, and I actually like that a lot. It's a very cool new development for their sound, as I always thought the airy vocal style they employed created a really unique vibe in their songs when utilized. Maybe this was done purposefully to indulge that sound, but the production on this album is very washed out and light for a metal album. It does take away from the heaviness and some points, but also makes for a very unique sensation. I really like the use of some folky acoustic guitar and vocal passages in places, as it makes for a very drastic and powerful dynamic with the heavier sections. And I love the long, epic progression that they close out the song Moorland is the Sea with.

22. Billie Eilish - WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?

Pop music has slowly been creeping into the forefront for me. Last year I named Rosalía's El Mal Querer my album of the year, and Kimbra's new album ranked among the year's best as well. But knowing Rosalía's music before she even made pop, and Kimbra being a pop artist that is generally more appreciated among music snob types, my enjoyment of this edgy teen-sensation and Spotify's most streamed album of the year seems the most like the endgame of a great opening up to pop music that's happened over the past few years for me. But I don't think it's all about me and the deterioration of my capacity for embarrassment. I think that mostly, there is a legitimate burst of creativity going on in pop music right now, and although Billie Eilish didn't start it, she's now certainly leading the charge.

In what is a rather extreme irony, I actually discovered this album more organically than most any other this year. I just heard someone listening to the song bury a friend and asked them who it was. I'd legitimately never heard of Billie Eilish before, but there were a few things that immediately stood out to me about this track. First and foremost, it was very dark for a pop song. Is it the darkest thing I've ever heard? No. But it is drastically different in tone than your typical anthemic, inspirational, dance pop track. I marveled upon the production on first listen. It was simultaneously rather minimalistic but also had a lot of interesting things going on. The quiet and close-to-the-mic vocal style is so antithetical to most annoyingly bombastic pop, and creates a real sense of intimacy, like she's whispering the song into you're ear. The harmony choices are haunting and extremely precise in the way they come in and out to distinguish the different sections. I heard influences from hip-hop in all the little extra sound samples that are thrown in and some of her vocal choices, but when she carries her notes out a little more and goes into her higher range in the bridge she reveals the beautiful jazzy qualities of her voice. All these influences combine to create quite a distinct and characteristic sound for her.

The lyrics I noticed we're totally different from most pop as well. I mean, I didn't know how popular it was when I first listened, so I just assumed that because she was singing lines like, "Step on the glass, staple your tongue / Bury a friend, try to wake up / Cannibal class, killing the son / Bury a friend, I wanna end me", that this was some indie-pop artist and not one of the biggest pop start in the world. She takes it even farther in another one of my favorite songs, all the good girls go to hell, which is the first time I think I've ever been able to describe the lyrics of a pop song as being apocalyptic and satanic. I mean, the chorus to this track goes like, "All the good girls go to hell / 'Cause even God herself has enemies / And once the water starts to rise / And heaven's out of sight / She'll want the devil on her team / My Lucifer is lonely". I have heard some people lob the accusation of her sort of 'trying too hard to be edgy' or something like that. I don't really know what that means but I find most her particularly dark lyrics like these do a pretty good job evoking a distinctly sinister mood, that feels aware of how unusual it is within this pop context, and defiantly doubles down on it. She even treads into, not just dark, but legitimately heavy territory on a song like you should see me in a crown, which takes elements of hip-hop and industrial music to create something that feels just as appropriate banging your head to as it does dancing. 

Some of the same people I've heard saying that she's trying to hard to be edgy or whatever are probably the kind of people that love listening to death metal concept albums about the demise of humanity or intergalactic space wars. What I'm saying is I think some people just resist giving credit to someone as popular as she is, but going back to when I first heard her, it was immediately apparent to me that the dark vision she has for her music was working and that it wasn't like anything I'd heard before. So well there is plenty of very dark music out there, and plenty of it is good, but how much of it isn't like anything else?

What I was surprised by also on this album, going in expecting these dark songs, is that she does a pretty damn good job transitioning into softer, ballad-type tracks. And it is the subtlety and minimalism that's consistent through her music that makes these tracks work as well. when the party's over, goes a full minute without any instrumentation other than vocals (save maybe for a few fleeting sounds/samples). I love then at the minute mark how they bring in a big subby bass sound with the chorus, but don't use any percussion. It has the effect of sounding huge and small at the same time. The vocal harmonies and layering in this song are beautiful, and again, she does a fantastic job choosing when to include and exclude them. Leaving them mostly bare on the final chorus as opposed to the denser previous versions is on of these great choices. Underneath all these layers and production choices however, lies some downright beautiful vocal melodies. Some of her songs have (and call for I think) very simple and subtle melodies, but this song shows she very capable of creating a powerful melodic progression. For that reason, I think this song may be the best indication of Billie's core talent as a songwriter, because in any stripped down or densely produced context, the way she builds up the melodies in the verses would be very memorable.

I think the reason that Billie Eilish's music is resonating so much with people is because the darkness and sort of dreamy narcosis of it all seems relevant to the times. If you think about where modern pop music really originated from in the 80's with overblown love ballads or shallow party/sex anthems and that sort of thing, this is really on the complete other end of the spectrum in terms of how it makes you feel. It usually sounds to me like modern pop artists are essentially just trying to write new Whitney Houston or Madonna songs, but Eilish really rejects those preconceived notions about what pop should be.

What people call 'mumble rap' has become quite popular over the past decade, and I wonder if Billie is really picking up a similar audience with her sort of brazenly subtle style of pop. I mean, it's night and day for me in terms of comparing the high quality of her music to that rather unlistenable auto-tune infested aforementioned style of hip-hop (and to separate them more I will note that Billie's brother and songwriting/production partner claims to not use any vocal tuning in their recordings), but there's clearly a desire for something that reflects the sort of lust for apathy that sometimes overcomes us in this crazy world where we're so inundated with information and communication, and we just want to disconnect. When she sings the hook "I don't need a xanny, now or ever" with a heavy and fast tremolo effect on her voice on the song xanny, which musically sounds like a fucked up remix of a lost jazz standard, I really feel how profoundly modern and pertinent her music is.

Dark TV, dark film, dark comedy - these things are all quite popular in the mainstream, especially with younger audiences. I've felt for a long time that there was a distinct absence of darkness in mainstream music. Sure there's plenty of dark music, and I could talk all day about how much dark music I love. But for legitimately dark music break this far into the mainstream is extremely encouraging. I really hope that this record becomes one of the most influential and important releases going into the next decade. In fact, I'd be surprised if it doesn't.

And it's not only cuz of Eilish that I'm excited about dark pop. In fact, in 2019 what is probably the best 'dark pop' song I've ever heard was released as the sort of b-side on a two track release called Awake by a young and rather undiscovered pop artist named Ashley Zarah, who I found by total happenstance. The title track is great, and quite the progressive pop song with it's odd-time signatures and eastern scales/instrumentation.

But for me, the real gem is the less technically ambitious, yet strikingly vivid and well-written song Control. And I'm not being hyperbolic - there are few songs as firmly positioned in the modern electro-pop genre that I've ever enjoyed more than this one. It's got this sublime, darkly elegant and dreamy heaviness to it, and she pulls off the dark vision of the track with such confidence, starting the song off with some very viscerally breathy beatboxing-type sounds, employing an almost ritualistic sounding aura of vocal harmonies as the main theme, and making lyrical mention of monsters, demagogues, and indoctrination. She kills the song vocally too, including a swirling, spellbinding bridge of hauntingly dense vocal layers and articulating every line of the verses with mesmeric style and character.

My problem with a lot of pop songs is that they sort of beat you over the head with an overly dumbed-down hook trying too hard to just get it stuck in your head. The hook in this song is not that way, and in fact, one little writing nuance that I adore about this song is how she changes the first lyrics in the chorus to "Despite, all that’s in my head" the second time, rather than "When I’m, caught up in my head", but still landing the hook on the 'I' vowel sound of each one. It's a subtle distinction but I love that presence of mind to change up the lyrics like that in a way that still perfectly serves the hook.

Even though I'm happy that Billie Eilish is on the top of the charts with her brand of dark pop now, this song is honestly just as deserving of being that popular as well and I'm quite surprised at how relatively unknown Ashley Zarah is based on how fucking amazing Control is. I mean, as much as I love the Eilish record, nearly everything about this song is better than anything on that album, especially in it's melodic/harmonic content, and it's just as dark as Eilish's darkest stuff. It's not necessarily fair to compare them as they're quite different - Zarah has more of a traditionally dramatic and grandiose approach to pop, and really shows the listener what she's capable of doing with her voice whereas Eilish takes a much more restrained approach, so I understand why that aspect of Eilish's style if making a splash right now. But come on; this song is 1000x times better and more evocative than 99% of that pop music that's big right now at the sacrifice of no catchiness or danceability whatsoever.

As I like to mention, I was on board with Rosalía before she even ever released pop music of any kind, so maybe I'll be bragging about knowing Zarah's music before she hits it big in the same way a few years from now. Speaking of Rosalía, she had an active year still after releasing my album of the year in 2018. She's done some pop collaboration that I didn't find that interesting (can't blame her though - she's getting bigger by the day). I'm reassured by a non-collaborative single she released called A Palé, which starts of with some traditional sounding flamenco, but quickly turns into her most rhythmically heavy and hip-hop influenced song to date. Though it's not necessarily the direction that I was hoping for, and sounds very influenced by modern trap production, I gotta say, I fucking love it. It's heavy and bold, and sees her really utilizing her lower vocal register. She sure has vision for everything she does, and that's why she's the pop artist that has my ear more than any other going into the next decade.

21. PoiL - Sus

I usually have a lot problems with sub-genre names. Post-hardcore? What does that even mean? Math rock? It's just creative rhythms, they're not solving equations! Stoner rock? People think I'm just saying I like getting high and listening to music! Art pop? It's music - it's a type of art already!

When I listen to an album like this, and I read it described as being 'brutal prog', I think to myself, 'yeah, that sounds about right'. 

This album is like if you took Emerson, Lake & Palmer and in 1973 showed them a Meshuggah album once and told them to try and make an album like that, except they also sing in French and have a background in creepy, religious chanting music.

ELP really isn't the perfect comparison. This is more akin to Zheul music like Magma, who were also French. It's just uncompromisingly crazy. I said this about another band somewhat similar this style whose album I liked last year (Koenji Hyakkei), but it's weird how with prog I tend to not like the really overly crazy and convoluted stuff because it lacks emotion, but when you get into these bands who get described as Zheul and brutal prog, they've gone so far in that direction that the music becomes quite evocative in a psychotic sort of way.

The reason I said ELP is because this band is a keyboard, bass and drum trio - no guitars. A lot of bands in this general style are larger, especially with Zheul bands a lot of them are almost like small big bands or orchestras. There's a sort of rawness to PoiL's sound that really distinguished them and adds a lot of intensity to their music.

Of course, because of the lack of guitars, the bass is extra important here, and bassist really delivers with the necessary intensity on every song. They remind me a bit of the great 90's prog band Änglagård with their aggressive bass tone, but even more aggressive sometimes, as in the end of the first track, Sus la peìra, where he throws a good amount of distortion on it and takes things into heavier direction near the end.

Some of these song would definitely be considered metal if the production wasn't so soft and vintage sounding. The beginning of the song Grèu Martire, sounds like the beginning to a Dillinger Escape Plan song without guitar in it's sort of heavy and dissonant zaniness. I actually really like the fact that the production is basically the opposite of modern metal. I think that if it was, the sort of comically crazy elements wouldn't be nearly as evocative, and so the heaviness that they incorporate musically ends up contributing to that feeling. Also, because they lack guitars it's easier for them accomplish this softer sound and so it really plays to their strengths as a band.

Another particularly unique feature of PoiL's sound is the vocal harmonies. Every member of the band contributes, and the vocal arrangements are surprisingly integral to the sound of these crazy compositions, often being the craziest part of the song. Just listen to the weird and very cleverly arranged spiral of different oral sounds that they begin the third track Luses Fadas with. It almost sounds like a really intricate vocal warm up or exercise but they way they incorporate it gives the songs a very perilous atmosphere, like some sort of cult chant.

Their music ventures into dark territory quite often. The quintessential track on this album is, of course, the closing 14+ minute epic, Chin fòu. The way they start off this song with the vocal harmonies is one of the best 'here we go' moments of the year for me. The heavy bass-keyboard interplay riffs on this song are very memorable relative to how this kind of music tends to be less reliant on memorability and more on 'listen to how crazy this is' in the moment appeal. The riffs are still really fucking crazy, but the memorability comes from a mix of them being good riffs and PoiL doing a great job with the composition and calling back their most compelling riffs as themes throughout the track.

They use a ton of unique sounds on this song especially. The glitchy synth solo that comes in about three minutes in is berserk, using a lot of rather extreme pitch bending tricks. There's a couple instances of some really blown out electronic drums on this song too. And they get bat-shit crazy about half way though the song with all these weird chromatically building melodies and oddly-effected vocal moans, before a brief pause of feedback like high range keyboard dissonance, and smashing ruthlessly into a heavy and fast rhythmic stomp of bass and drums.

The payoff for all this absurdity and build up comes at around ten minutes with, of course, more absurdity, as they transition back to a variation of the riff from the beginning. Somehow, this time its way weirder; more rhythmically syncopated and fucked up, and even kookier, faintly dub-step-esque sound manipulations by the keyboard player. And when I say payoff, don't expect a quick wrap up. There's about another four minutes-worth of this insanity.

If it's too much for you, it's too much. This isn't a kind of music that I would recommend to most people, or even admit to listening to depending on who I'm talking to and whether not I want them to think I'm a lunatic. But there's something about the juxtaposition of the barbaric tone and the musical complexity of the material on this album that I really like.

20. Brian Krock - liddle

As someone that got into jazz mostly by progressive rock bands like King Crimson who incorporated a lot of jazz into their music, it's funny now to hear a bona fide jazz composer who incorporates a lot of prog into their jazz. And in fact, this may be my new go to recommendation for anyone that loves prog who wants to get into jazz.

Brian Krock released one of my favorite jazz albums last year as the composer of the group Big Heart Machine, and similarly incorporated a lot of progressive rock elements into his music. That was a big band record however, and this is a tight six-person group, making for a much different experience. With the smaller band, it's a bit closer sounding to rock. But at the same time, it's closer to jazz because there's more space for the improvised leads and also more improvisation in general I think. I do love big band music so I'm not sure whether I like this better than last year's release or not but I do really enjoy the chemistry that you hear between this sextet, as it feels a lot more like a live recording (not sure if it is).

The prog rock influence in this music is interesting because although the rhythmic experimentation was originally influenced primarily by jazz music, prog has since surpassed jazz in terms of rhythmic complexity in most ways, as much of the last two or three decades of progressive rock and metal music has consisted of bands trying to one up each other with more odd time signatures, polyrhythms and the like.

But one thing that's apparent to me when listening to this record is that progressive rock music still has a lot of catching up to do with the levels of melodic and harmonic experimentation that jazz has reached. A lot of the melodies that these songs circulate around are totally weird. They're dark, but not in a standard way. A lot of diminished scales and things of this nature; things that I can't really place just listening. The song (flip) is starts off and eventually returns to a theme that is both quite strange both melodically and rhythmically. It reminds me a bit of one of my favorite legendary jazz composers and saxophonists, Ornette Coleman, in the way that Krock composes bizarre melodies and the builds his songs around them, though less than exactly 60 years after the release of The Shape of Jazz to Come 1959, this record pushes that melodic bizarreness to new levels.

That's high praise for a saxophone player, but Krock's quite deserving, as not only has he composed the majority of the album himself, he also takes some fantastic solos and demonstrates great chops on saxophone, as well as the clarinet. One of my favorite solos of his is own the second track, Knuckle Hair. They set up the saxophone solo with a unique and cerebral section of chaotic interplay between an awesomely volatile drum solo and some very brutish, distorted guitar soloing that sounds more like a bunch of improvised riffs. Like here, there's a lot of moments on this album where you think, 'wow, there's so much going on here, there's no way they could add anything else', and then in comes another instrument to rip a solo over all the established craziness. As Krock's sax solo in this one goes on, the whole instrumentation intensifies accordingly with the drums throwing in some big fills and the distorted guitars opening up a bit and letting the noise saturate the mix.

It's not really just the Krock show in terms of solos though, and like the best records, he's assembled a very capable team of musicians around him to share the spotlight. Guitarist Olli Hirvonen takes that spotlight near the end of the song Memphis with a wild solo that closes out the track. You can really hear him blending a knowledge of rock and jazz soloing. Just like when he's playing rhythm, he's using quite a bit more distortion on his guitar than you would typically hear on a jazz record and that tendency gives these songs a real extra bite to them and it goes with the craziness of it all.

If you wanna just hear the craziest this album gets skip ahead to track number seven, Composition No. 23b, which is a jazz shred-fest if I've ever heard one. People that love impressive musicianship will love this song, though I maintain that it's still a very passionately played piece of wild avant-garde jazz music and not just a technical display. I love the section around two-minutes in where the piano, bass and keyboard have a kind of mutual synchronized melodic freak out, before Krock comes back in and starts soloing over all of it in extremely noisy fashion. It's another phenomenal solo. They build up so much intensity before powerfully returning to the blazing fast main theme that started the song at the end.

That's one of the things that makes Krock's writing so strong, both on this record and his last, is the dynamic nature of his compositions. This isn't one of those jazz albums where each track is a consistent mood. Nearly everything that Krock comes up with is leading to a big climax. On the song Saturnine, things get progressively more dissonant and sinister sounding as things go on, including some phenomenally discordant piano soloing, until it reaches a sort of cinematically brooding march at the end with all sorts of turbulent tempo changes. It's quite heavy and in a moment like this, not only do they reach a peak of intensity, they sort of surpass the rhythmic complexity of the progressive rock and metal bands that they're influenced by (also the way the clarinet comes crassly barging in for it's solo in this song is one of the best solo entrances I've ever heard, holy shit, this song is nuts - I listened to it again after I finished this review, and I'm bumping it up to one of my favorite songs of the year. With the piano playing, the clarinet solo, and the heavy as fuck composed ending, this song is a masterpiece of absurdly dark avant-garde jazz).

That's the key to this record for me, is that even just bringing elements of rhythmic complexity from bands like King Crimson and Meshuggah into a jazz record like this is ambitious enough, but to really keep pushing rhythmic complexity in the way that he does on both this record and his release last year, shows that Brian Krock is one of the most ambitious composers in music right now, at least within my sphere of awareness.

I mean, between the rhythmic and harmonic complexity on this thing, this has gotta be one of the most advanced and denotatively progressive collections of music I've ever heard. It's like listening to a breakthrough experiment in music. It's Frankenstein jazz. But somehow it's still pretty damn fun to jam out to as well.

For instrumental albums with high musicianship, there was one other very notable release this year - You Know What...? by The Aristocrats. This album featured a couple of my favorite pieces of music of the year so it was really close to making this list. As a guitarist, listening to Guthrie Govan play is always such a treat. I really love the spagetti western sounding epic The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde. And I could be wrong but I fee like I detect somewhat of an Animals as Leaders-type influence in the song Spanish Eddie (listen to the part where the guitar fades in after the heavy section at 5:40), which also incorporates a lot of Spanish sounds. It's really interesting to hear Guthrie mixing his styles in that way.

It's these really intense tracks that I love the most from these guys, as they're able to generate so much fervor just from the three of them. Everyone kills it instrumentally on this album, although that's kind of the point of the band of course.

My favorite song is the sublimely heavy dinosaur ode Terrible Lizard. This song is seriously one of the most evocative songs of the year, in that it just very directly evokes a big monster sauntering around destroying everything it's path, and with an amusingly childlike sort of demeanor and charm. I just love the brutishness of this composition so much. What sounds to me just like big chromatic power-chord changes that make up the main theme are so clunky. And the ferocious tones he pulls out of his guitar on the leads are ingeniously integrated into the vision of the song. This song is a perfect example of how people with such an advanced technical grasp of their instrument can apply that expertise in a way that so explicitly and cleverly makes an artistic vision really come to life, rather than just for technical showmanship or athleticism. 

19. Opeth - In Cauda Venenum

It's been over ten years now since Opeth last put a death growl on record, but still just the short appearance of some steady sixteenth-note death metal-esque kick drum beats right in the opening of the first song on In Cauda Venenum (second track), Dignity, got me quite excited on first listen. And though the growling remains absent, this new record is, I'd say, the heaviest they've released in their new growl-less era, and is much more genuinely definable as a 'progressive metal' record. In fact, combined with what is a quite well-done psychedelic into track, the way that this first song storms out of the gate with it's distinctly heavy riffage and very creatively placed bursting vocal harmonies, I'm inclined to call it one of my favorite openings to an Opeth album (looking back on their discography there is a hell of a lot of competition, but no doubt this album really pulls you in right from the start).

The heaviest moments are not confined to the beginning however. Right in the middle of the album Charlatan raises the bar of heaviness with a syncopation more reminiscent of a band like Meshuggah than what you'd expect from Opeth. What I really like about this track however is not this foundational heaviness but rather the way that they integrate this somewhat uncharacteristically modern heaviness into their retro/psychedelic aesthetic, and not just with the more 70's-esque guitar tone and production, but in particular the phenomenal keyboard lead playing by Joakim Svalberg, who really makes this song in my opinion. His playing in this song is filled with chromatic runs which really adds a level of absurdity to the song and makes it that much more colorful, and more importantly keeps it consistent with the cartoonish, trippy aesthetic that this and the last few Opeth albums have had, well still allowing them to explore heaviness in a way that maximizes that aspect of their sound as well. So it sounds simultaneously very retro and also maybe the closest to modern sounding heaviness they've approached this decade. And the penultimate section of the song which starts with a short zany, dissonant keyboard interlude and then breaks into a head-spinning locked in section of complex eastern-scale riffs between the guitars and keyboard is everything a fan of prog rock and metal could wish for.

Even though it's bit heavier, as many Opeth fans are constantly and loudly hoping for, this album is far from fan service, as I'd also contend that it's their most inaccessible release of the decade as it conforms even less to contemporary pop structure than they typically have on their recent records. Hell, Dignity was the lead single and that song basically has a 100% linear structure. That in a way is a call back to early Opeth as if you listen to a lot of their 90's output most of it seems very, what I would call, stream-of-consciousness-written, in the sense that they just allow whatever ideas and riffs to float out and build the song from one place to another. It seems this way especially in Dignity when they seemingly modulate keys going from a section of hard rock riffs into a more anthemic chordal part. In a way I think this style of writing is where Opeth really shines, as even though their songs aren't quite as long now as some of my favorite Opeth classics, songs with this sort of structure and that degree of unpredictability serve to replicate that 'each song as a journey' sensation that I really love about them.

In fact, something distinct about this Opeth album is that there's not really any exclusively soft and slow songs. Lovelorn Crime is a ballad, but in a more grandiose 80's type of way and all building up into what is surely one of the best solos guitarist Fredrik Åkesson has ever recorded. It's melancholic but still a fairly densely layered recording and by no means stripped down in the way that Opeth have approached many softer tracks in their history. Now, I love a lot of Opeth's softer songs so this is by no means a strength in and of itself, but there is just as much melancholia and acoustic guitars on this album overall as ever, it's just all interspersed within larger, varied songs amidst the heaviness, and this is part of the reason why I find this album a bit less accessible for an Opeth record.

I do think however for a lot of Opeth fans this record is probably much more satisfying than the last couple, as it's not just heavier, but the heaviness is also quite varied. Heart in Hand, though it eventually travels into wacky psychedelic territory and acoustic melancholia, gives us a good four and a half minutes from the start of fantastic and rather fast-paced, galloping, classic sounding heavy metal. It seems somewhat similar to the sound they've been going for on some of the more straightforward heavy tracks of the last few albums, but not really so straightforward this time, and executed incredibly well. The vocal melodies in this string of sections are killer, the drumming is violently tight, and that one very twisted and heavy riff in the middle really stands out.

The impression that I get from this album and Opeth going into the next decade is a band that is committed to doing whatever it is that they want and not catering to critics or fans, but is committed just as much to pushing creative boundaries and being able to take inspiration from both new sounds, and also from their own history to make something fresh. If you listen closely to this album you can hear a lot of elements of Opeth from all throughout the past three decades. In All Things Will Pass they bring the vocal hook in over this long, winding 8-bar riff that totally reminds me of one of the greatest strengths that stands out from Opeth's golden years, which is the long-form metal riff. But just as they incorporate past strengths, they also tread a lot of new ground on this new album with a song like The Garroter which is the most distinctly jazzy composition they've ever come up with, and also on my favorite moment on the album - the final section of the song Next of Kin, which ends the song on a forcefully sluggish sort of doomy-prog riff ingeniously engulfed in a elegantly dense orchestral string arrangement, creating such a unique cinematic heaviness. This kind of potential for creative genius within heavy music is why I'm still always looking forward to the next step for Opeth, and this step in 2019 was definitely one that fortified that excitement that I have for the band.

If you still wanna hear some progressive heavy music that incorporates growling, I've got two albums to recommend.

The first is quite Opethian. It's called Veil of Imagination by Wilderun, and I think a lot of fans of old Opeth will enjoy it because it has a lot of dynamics, long songs, and heavy riffs. It is a bit different though, particularly in the sense that their softer parts a bit more theatrical, the heavy parts are a bit more strictly death metal styled, and and they've got quite a bit of orchestral elements going. But if you're into old Opeth there's little chance that you won't be into the song The Tyranny of Imagination, which features some absolutely nasty riffage reminiscent of Ghost Reveries.

The second is not so Opethian, but rather just very progressive and adventurous death metal. It's called The Hidden History of the Human Race by Blood Incantation. This one has been highly celebrated by a lot of critics in the metal world and even though death metal that is this death metaly is not my cup of tea, I do see why. I really appreciate the conceptual focus of this record, and if you are into this style, and you happened to miss this one, I think you'll probably be enthralled by the the 18+ minute closing odyssey of a track, totally unpretentiously titled Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul). It's a lot to taken in but for a nearly twenty-minute song of a style of music I'm not that into I found it surprisingly engaging, starting off as a total riff-fest but becoming quite the powerfully composed and epic song by the end. The post-ambient section reintroduction of guitar around 7:30 is one of the most epic moments in metal this year. 

18. black midi - Schlagenheim

I've never liked the term Math Rock. Besides it being a little pretentious, I think that it infers some things about the music it's describing that aren't necessarily true. Any music that's described using the word math sounds like it should be very calculated and precise. You can just imagine a group of nerdy musicians starting down at their instrument and counting every beat. To an extent, I think that the inference of the genre name has come to influence that actual sound of the genre of late, as a lot of math rock bands these days do sound extremely clean and calculated.

Of course, math rock is just a way describing bands who feature a lot of complex and experimental rhythms in their music. In a way, the genre title has a sort of fundamental misunderstanding of music. There's plenty of music that's very complex and challenging from a harmonic perspective, but we don't have any specific genre for that. A rock band that experiments deeply with harmony is just a creative rock band. Yet, harmony is just as indebted to math as rhythm is.

To me, black midi are a punk rock band. Everything they do oozes defiance and disorder. But this doesn't come in contrast to their rhythmic complexity. Rather, rhythmic complexity is such a great tool for accomplishing the punk ethos. It's the basic 4/4 back beats that sound precise and innocuous. There more you mess around with rhythm, the more off-kilter and hard to follow things become. What I love about this album is that the aesthetic of the music follows that mentality.

I mean, when you listen to the second half of the song Reggae

and you hear all that wild guitar noise, and you hear the delirious ranting of the vocalist, it doesn't put you in a comfortable place. Yet, all these things are very deliberate. He's using some sort of pedal setup to get that noise. The singer penned those lyrics on a piece of paper like everyone else. My point is to say that the amount of predetermination that these sorts of complex rhythms require doesn't mean that they have to sound that planned. The beauty of this record is how spontaneous and anarchic it all feels.

It's like how when you watch a fight scene in a movie, you know that it took a lot of choreography from the actors and preparation for the cameras and lighting and all that, but when you're watching it in the moment, you want it to feel authentically unstable, and not have to consider all that. If they can accomplish that they've done a good job with the scene. And that's exactly the sort of mindset that black midi thrives on - that authenticity. I mean, what's sounds more authentic than the maniacal yelling of a song like Near DT, MI? That song sounds like a fight scene embodied in music.

It's interesting how they incorporate clean guitars into a lot of their material too. I really enjoy the clean guitars in the song Western, which is the longest song on the album and sits right in the middle of the album at track 5, serving as a sort of break for the hectic intensity of the rest of the album but also deeply exploring the subtlety of their music.

I have a hard time putting my finger on what I like about these parts. They're never expressly beautiful or melancholic sounding in any way. In fact, a lot of their clean parts have this sort of futuristic detachment to them. I hesitate to use the term emotionless because it sounds negative, but the frequent softer sections that intersperse their songs definitely have a coldness or callousness to them that really sets up the passion of the louder sections. It reminds me in some places of King Crimson's 80's material, especially as they mix it with the spoken word vocals in a song like Speedway, it sounds like it's straight off of KC's Discipline.

It's quite less complex than KC but I think I like the way black midi incorporate that specific kind of stuff more, because of how you know that it's never too far away from breaking into a totally contrasting storm of noise and yelling. In fact, some of their songs are based off of what seem like banally simple ideas. The final track, Ducter, is all centered around a very straightforward three note loop. It's such a simple and short idea that it feels like they're rebelling against complexity by trying to tie a whole song around it. It ends up being one of my favorite songs just because of how much fervor the song develops as it goes on and get louder.

And those louder sections are consistently just awesome. The end of the song bmbmbm for example is massively eccentric. The way the guitars bounce off of the feedback reminds me of really abrasive metallic hardcore bands like Converge, which I wouldn't be surprised they're taking a little influence from. In fact, as I write this review and make these comparisons, I'm realizing that black midi are sort of like something between 80's King Crimson and early 2000's Converge and that is an awesome amalgamation to have, though there's a lot of other influences going on too.

Because they have such a compelling sound and style, it's hard not to favor the first track on the record 953, where they really just present themselves and what makes them great right upfront. This song has my favorite riffs on the album, and moreover, the way they sort of go free-time at one point amidst all the noise before breaking back into the riffage, and then how they gradually yet violently slow down the tempo before hitting you with the main riff one last time at the last second is so satisfying. It's not just that their drummer is amazing, and that they use unique rhythms, they also just don't give a shit if what they're doing makes sense or could be written, which is exactly the kind of experimental approach to rhythm that really makes this album so evocative. 

I love how chaotic and dirty this music all is. The idea that rhythmic complexity should coincide with machine-like exactness needs to die, and the band that's best equipped to kill it now is black midi. I highly recommend watching this live performance from earlier in the year, a few months before this album came out: https://youtu.be/TMn1UuEIVvA. Such a passionate performance from such a passionate band.

I will say, that although I do really love the noisy-math sound of that record, and wish more mathy bands embraced a noisier tone overall, I'm not as opposed to nice and clean math rock as I just sort of indicated. Chon released a self-titled album this year, and although it was a familiar sound for them, I still really enjoyed it. I think that because they go so deliberately for the cleaner sound it's easier to just accept them that way. They make easy-listening music that you can still really engage and focus on, almost like a meditation of sorts. It's a unique sound that I do really appreciate, for totally different reasons than black midi.

This is also my best opportunity to mention an alternative/indie rock with some elements of math rock (as well as electronic, pop, punk, hard rock) that I really enjoyed this year called Djinn by Lingua Nada. It reminds me a bit of some proggy alternative rock bands like Porcupine Tree and Mew, but they're really hard to place. The song Baraka starts off very electronic and catchy, but gets quite riffy and heavy at the end. The whole album has a really cool mix of sounds going and is one of my favorite productions of the year in the way they mix rock instrumentation with all sorts of synths and electronic percussion. Meanwhile, the songwriting is both really melodic and delightfully unexpected. The way that the song Habiba evolves in the second half from light indie rock to blast beats to electro-math rock is dazzling. This one was very close to being in my top 25.

17. Liturgy - H.A.Q.Q.

It's not unusual for me to decide I'm gonna give an album a chance because of the album cover. It's not anywhere near a perfect science, but I do figure that if there's something compelling about the album art there's going to be something compelling about the music.

Well, this album art is not beautiful or evocative prima facie. In fact, I kind of hate it. But seeing it made me wonder what kind of madman just throws a convoluted chart of complex philosophical ideas on to an album cover. I mean, it kind of looks like it was thrown together in Microsoft Word. But I just had to listen and see what was going with this music.

I'm not even a big black metal guy. But what I hear here is a lot more than black metal, and this is an incredibly innovative album no matter what kind of metal it's rooted in. The music on this record features normal black metal instrumentation with guitar, bass, drums and low-mixed black metal screaming, but is pretty much always saturated with an array of programmed sounds. The rawness that you get with your standard black metal music is juxtaposed against the most unraw kind of music you could match it with. They even make frequent use of glitchy electronic edits wherever they see fit.

You'll notice how well they integrate this stuff into the music right from the get go on the song HAJJ, which throws in those glitches right at the perfect moment, before ushering in a massive new riff about half-way through. It's sort of like the way modern electronic songs double and quadruple time the tempo right before the 'drop', but in a far more abrasive way and with so much more going on musically and textually.

It's sort of genius how they noticed the similarity between the trance of an electronically-induced loop of sound and the sort of brutal ambiance of black metal rhythms. In the second half of the song HAQQ, they go absolutely berserk with the glitchy electronics, in a way that the music seemingly becomes more electronic than it is any form of metal. The best moment on the album comes after this section of upfront electronic debauchery, and an approximately 30-second long something's-wrong-with-my-computer-type sound gives way to an immense metal riff. That sublime transition is one of the best moments in metal all year. They're at their best when they're using these unique elements to move their songs along and emphasize the most climactic points of their compositions.

They bastardize black metal a bit more at times with these sort of half blast beat parts that have a distinct explosive high tempo burst and stop, almost reminding me of fast flamenco guitar type rhythms with little rests in between flares of strumming. They're incredibly forceful, especially when they transition into them with the glitchy stuff. It also sort of reminds me of progressive post-hardcore stuff like the Mars Volta, who did a lot of fast staccato type rhythms, though ultimately the music here sounds nothing like any of the examples I've given. A huge benefit of this type of writing is that all the extra sounds get a little more clarity out of those short rests in between the guitars and drums, working to sort of show the listener all the textures that are going on underneath, and thus making them more present when the guitars and the drums are leaving no extra space in the mix.

There's all sorts of unexpected sounds getting mixed in with the black metal on this album. There's choirs, flutes, strings, piano; I don't think there's anything that Liturgy are principally opposed to working in, and it wouldn't surprise me if part of the songwriting and mixing process was just throwing every possible idea into the established metal foundations of the song and seeing what sticks. I love that level of creativity and disregard for convention. The songs Virginity and Pasaqalia lead directly into each other, bridged by a melodic and atmospheric chime or high-range bells part that colors the heavy riff that starts after the transition. It's hard to be heavy and heavenly at the same time but somehow they manage to pull that sort of contradiction out in spots like this.

It is just a lot more colorful than anything you'd typically get in black metal. And more so, the extra sounds sort of work to cushion the mix amidst the harsh onslaught of guitars, making this a bit easier to listen to even if it's nearly impossible to totally make out what's going on harmonically most of the time. In a sense, the confusion fits the music, and taking a look at the album cover, I'd say that confusion may be a sort of ulterior artistic intention for them. It all makes for a sort of profound cerebral overload and I think they'd be happy to hear their music described that way.

16. Moon Tooth - Crux

I knew from the first second I heard Moon Tooth back in 2016 that this was a band I was going to be following for a long time. These guys are embraced within the metal and prog communities, but what I like best about them is that well they incorporate lots of heavy and complex elements into their music, their overall sound and style is an embodiment of rock n' roll.

That's what is important after all, is that while they have those reference points, they utilize them to create songs that make you wanna move. Take a song like Awe at All Angles, for example, which has really intricate riffs and lead playing, but it's also just a fun as hell song to jam out to. Same goes for one my favorite songs, Thumb Spike, which has these really zany guitar runs in it, but at the end they build up into a heavy, beefed up version of what was a previously rather subdued verse riff. This part is incredibly intense but again, still really fucking fun and energetic.

In fact, energetic may be the word for Moon Tooth more than any other. Their mix of musical intricacy, heaviness, and rock n' roll attitude is a mix that comes together incredibly well to get your blood pumping and keeping you very much engaged in what they're playing. I love how they start off the album on the song Trust, which goes through like three different half-time, double-time tempo changes on the initial riff within seconds of hitting play. It's like their grabbing your shoulders and shaking you around and yelling into your face 'are you ready for this!?'. I also love how much of a curve ball they throw in near the end of this song with the insane section of progressive rock n' roll riffage mixed with a horn section. Some of their songs really give you that roller coaster effect of just disorienting you in the funnest way possible.

And as fun as so much of this album is, they're still able to impressively insert a lot of somewhat melancholic emotion into these riff-laden bangers. They don't do this by some sort of awkward transition into theatrical piano rock or anything like that. Rather they really utilize the inherent bluesiness in their music to access that particular kind of soulful passion. I've always liked their vocalist a lot, but he brigs it to a whole new level on the song Through Ash, where the way he belts out the line "burn this cage" in the chorus with his very unique husky inflection had me belting out with him every time I listened (which was many). That song has one of the best vocal performances of the year in my opinion, and for a band with so much going on for it instrumentally, the added layer of emotion he can add to it really gets me excited about them and their future output.

On Crux, Moon Tooth are making exactly that kind of heavy music that I want to be being made at this point in time, based on how rock and metal music have developed in the past half-century. They've got all the right influences, and also, they're exactly the kind of musicians that need to be making this kind of music. Only two albums in, but I have a strong feeling they're gonna be on a lot more of these end of the year lists in the years to come as they carry that rock n' roll torch.

Another fast-paced, high-energy mixture of metal and hard rock I'd recommend from this year is King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard's Infest the Rat's Nest, the eclectic psychedelic rock band's focused foray into trash and retro heavy metal music. They go for a really raw production on this which I think is perfect. And both the songs that mix in funner hard rock elements like Mars for the Rich and the bona fide thrash metal bangers like the closing track Hell make for lively listens. I love the way they bring a new, heavy thrash verse in right at the end of the ladder. The verses in thrash metal music are often the most hard-hitting part of the song, so bringing in a new one and playing it once at the end of the record like that is a great example of how a creative band trying a different style can come up with some really fresh ideas that enhance the style their delving into.

15. Ithaca - The Language of Injury

It's very hard to stand out in the metal scene right now. Metal production is so streamlined and refined. Sub-genres of sub-genres are defined to a fault. Especially I find with metalcore/mathcore music, even though I love the sound and energy of it, I generally don't find myself wanting to come back to new music I find that falls within that category. I think it's because the amount of unexpected changes and lack of comprehensible melody make this kind of music unmemorable relative to other styles. Even though it's great in the moment, bands like this tend not to stick with me. This debut by Ithaca however, is completely the opposite. I found myself wanting to go back to this record over and over again. Why?

Well first of all, I want to point of that this album has magnificent production. Best metal production of the year and one of the best sounding albums overall. Not just in the sense of clarity, but there's a certain kind of room reverb tying this mix together and bringing these songs to life in an aggressively intimate way. Listen to the end of the song Youth vs. Wisdom and you'll hear how they use reverb to give this album a really 'steel-wall basement' vibe. It's especially apparent also in the clean sections on the album too (I'm sure they raise the reverb at these points but it just serves to embellish the overall atmosphere of the album).

It also just sounds tight as hell, partly because of the performance and partly because the drum recordings are outstanding. It's one of those albums that I really learned to appreciate while listening to it in my car because you can blast it without it becoming too jarring or noisy (in a bad way), which is pretty uncommon for music this dissonant and fast-paced. They don't use the noisiest guitar tones which may be a big part of that. It's a bit unusual for me because typically in this style I prefer the guitars to be as noisy as possible, and of course my gold standard for this style, and really metal in general is Converge's Jane Doe, which is the greatest harnessing of 'noisiness' ever put to record. But I think that the more gated and tight distorted tones work well on this record because of the reverb that I mentioned previously. It's different than Jane Doe, but in a similar way this record feels like it has a really committed sound. Listen to some of the extremely tight riff-work at the end of Impulse Crush and you'll really hear how that precision amplifies the album's heaviness. The space that's left by the tightness of the recording, and the sound of the room that lies between it just makes everything feel very cold and dark in an evocative way. To their credit though they do have some totally filthy moments, and they make very good use of feedback in a way very reminiscent of Converge, particularly on the opening track New Covenant, which is all about the feedback in the final riff of the song.

Even with all that to say about the production, the fulcrum of quality in any metallic hardcore release is of course, the riffs. And boy do they deliver in that department. There's two things in particular I love about their riffs. First is their totally unapologetic and blatant use of dissonance. A big theme for them throughout this album is exactly those sort of Dillinger Escape Plan-esque riffs that jump between chugging and purely cacophonous chords. On a song like Secretspace they barely go a moment without utilizing extreme dissonance, save for the clean section, and when they transition into a slower dissonant-chord based riff at the end it's unbelievably heavy, especially because of how when they build up into that riff they very briefly make it seem like they're about to go into clean section, a small choice that I love because of how it maximizes the incoming force of that massive riff. They do a fantastic job controlling their dynamics for transitioning and bringing in riffs, something that is so important in this style.

The second awesome type of riff they do are are these sort of unstable-time signature, melodic unison guitar runs against heavy percussive chugging (the drummer does a great job accentuating these). What I love about these are that they maintain the chaotic feel of the rest of the music through the timing, but simultaneously they add some good melodic content to the otherwise onslaught of dissonance.

They do break up the riffing on a good amount of these songs with more straightforward parts where they strum on chords or tremolo pick in a way that could remind you of post-harcore or black metal depending on your reference points. This isn't the stuff that I come for but when they end a song like the title track, which starts off with one of the most badass riffs of the year, with a more emotionally charged section in this vein, it really completes the composition in a powerful way, and they even include a little bit of background clean vocals layered against screams to bring things to a distinctly emotional crescendo.

They sure can fit a lot into an under four minute song, and that brings me to one last thing that I love about this album.: they're in and out of this record at 30 minutes and 56 seconds. That is just about as short as is allowed to even be considered an LP generally. Yet for this berserk style of music, I really appreciate the brevity, in the same way I've always appreciated brevity in individual songs in this style. The suddenness of it all works with all the unpredictable tempo changes to accentuate the psychosis that this kind of music depicts, and after you get through this album, you're left wondering, 'what just happened'? And also, 'that was heavy as fuck, where can I get more of it'?

14. Pijn & Conjurer - Curse These Metal Hands

Happy metal - a burgeoning phenomenon of the 2010's lead by Deafheaven's rise to popularity with their breakthrough 2013 album Sunbather, and further explored by groups like the self-described "dream thrash" band Astronoid. After bands like Explosions in the Sky and Sigur Ros revolutionized rock music in the 2000's with their Ionian melodic soundscapes, some bands in the 2010's have asked the question, 'what if we do that, but heavier?'

Well in 2019 Pijn & Conjurer are asking, 'what if we that, but even heavier?'

And I totally wasn't expecting it when I threw this album on. When Conjurer released their debut album just last year - an album that made this very same list - it was demonic and grimy as hell; not happy in any way whatsoever. I've never heard of Pijn, and I don't know if this is closer to the sound they go for typicality, but it's clear that these two bands were brought together by a very clear vision.

There's no effort to conceal what they're doing here. The music is unmistakably uplifting right from the start. The first song, High Spirits, begins with a luscious chord based arrangement of clean guitars. It immediately invokes post-rock, but I also hear quite a bit of American Primitvism in it. Melodically, it does make a lot of sense what's going on with the sound on this album. They make quite extensive use of the major pentatonic scale on this song, a scale often used in Americana and Country music.

They're not the first metal band to do this, and in fact, I believe that they're taking quite deliberate inspiration from the band Baroness. The now seminal Georgia-based sludge metal band, although they never quite had the direction to write metal that was exclusively upbeat and positive, made a name for themselves by incorporating their southern heritage into their music, often with big major pentatonic harmonies.

Pijn & Conjurer are taking that sound and running with it on this song. The harmonies at the end are huge, and overall their heaviness is so melodic. Few songs could make want to go out and conquer the world and chase my dreams more than this one. I think that 'High Spirits' is one of the most fitting song titles of the year cuz that's exactly how it makes me feel.

Their clean vocals actually remind me a lot of Baroness too, in their sort of anthemic gruffness. In a way, this is the direction I wish Baroness had taken their music, cuz they've pretty much expelled metal out of their sound at this point. Some of their newer stuff has been alright but their first few albums were amazing, and some of the things Pjin & Conjurer are doing here are more of an advancement of that sound than what Baroness have been up to for most of this decade.

What I love about this album is that it is both radically upbeat but still incredibly heavy. These guys aren't coming from a background of faster paced forms of metal like Deafheaven or Astronoid. I feel that this is overall a much more fluent incarnation of happy metal. I am a big fan of Deafheaven, but there's always an extent to which their combination of black metal rhythms and shrill screams with positive sounding music will feel like an interesting juxtaposition. I'm not a big black metal guy anyways. Sludge metal is my favorite kind of metal and so that's a real treat for me, to get a happier version of what I already love.

The heaviness of it all is surprisingly fitting. The music feels empowering and triumphant. Now, some 'triumphant' sounding metal music in unbearably cheesy, but the genuine heaviness that these guys bring to the table (again, Conjurer released one of the filthiest metal albums of the year last year) really sells the emotion. And the growling vocals are of the deeper variety so they do feel much bolder than higher range screams, invoking a sense of strength rather than suffering.

Part of that of course is that they write great riffs. The second song, The Pall, suspends their positivity to some extent, with more familiarly heavy riffage. I'd be disappointed that they depart from the central vision of the album if it wasn't such a fantastic string of intense and very rhythmic riffage. The drummer on this album has a great habit of inserting stops just at the right moment in some of their riffs and coming back in hard to add that extra bit of liveliness. And a lot of these songs in general have great grooves. 

I'll say, the riffs in this song aren't super uncharacteristically dark. It's more just straight powerful and post-metal-esque. I think it helps the album as a whole that this song isn't as explicitly happy, because it hammers that idea home that this music is meant to sound strong and fearless. The outro riff is the only really upbeat sounding riff on this one, and so the song sort of climaxes with a reprise of the album's main vision.

It doesn't hurt that this album sounds fantastic. I'm totally envious of both their clean guitar tones and the very clear and mighty sound they get during the heavier parts. Makes me wonder - does two bands equal double the recording budget...? Although Conjurer's last album sounded great too (especially for a debut sludge metal album) so maybe they have a good hookup. I'm just really impressed with how this sounds. There's a lot of melody playing amidst highly distorted chords, loud drums and screaming but I'm uncannily satisfied with how everything is mixed.

This album is barely over 30-minutes and only features four songs. And so aside from the quick, yet awesome 2-minute sludge metal jam, Endeavor, these songs all take the form of 9-10 minute compositions.

There's something to be said for an album like this, that for about 1/3 of the album experience you're either listening to the first track or the last track. I always have the feeling that the first and last track on an album are a bit easier to get into because they come with a sense of importance. They are the statements of the artist, of what they're all about at the beginning, and what they want you to leave with at the end. I've always been partial to records like this - Yes' 1973 masterpiece Close to the Edge comes to mind with it's three song track-listing. It just always feels like a very serious and judicious artistic undertaking when you put everything into a few long songs and call it an album.

The last song on the album, Sunday, certainly fits into the paradigm. The last five minutes or so of the song build up with a really beautiful post-rock-type mix of acoustic and electric guitar. It's pretty impressive how well-written these more melancholic sections are wherever they are on the album. And just as impressive is how smoothly they switch between these sorts of parts and the heavier sections.

After that really lovely clean section, they have this wonderful sort of chord progression that they very calmly switch to, playing cleanly first with lots of gorgeous embellishment, before kicking the distortion back on and playing that same progression much louder. Then one guitar starts playing a corresponding melody, and then the other guitar harmonizes. It's such a well-composed section of building, thematic, melodic music and such a blissfully decisive ending to the album. It really reinforces the experience of the record and the powerfully uplifting sound that they laid out throughout that 30-minutes.

13. Patrick Watson - Wave

So many albums that I like I end up categorizing as either atmospheric or intimate; epic or personal; ethereal or visceral. My first exposure to the wonderful songwriting of Patrick Watson reminds me that these distant and close qualities that make great music so evocative are not so mutually exclusive. 

And I don't mean to suggest that he sort of straddles the line between emotions here. It's more that there's a very strong juxtaposition between the powerful intimacy of this record and beautifully dense layers of instrumentation, much of which is achieved through dynamics. For this reason the first song that really struck me on this record was Broken, which starts off as a  very quaint and simple piano and vocal piece, and has the simplest chorus of the record, just repeating the line "Do you feel a little broken?". But as the intimacy of this song reaches it's peak in the second verse, with some of the most poignant lyrics of the year, "Pack your bags with all the lives you've been before / And leave behind what you don't want no more / Sometimes, sometimes you wanna, wanna go back / But it don't work like that", the synths and drums start to build in gradually. It's not just a swell of instrumental layers that give this song such a magnificent ending however - a lot of the credit goes to the way Watson varies the chorus line as things become more intense. He's got a really unique and breathy sort of way of articulating when he's singing louder - reminds me a little bit of Peter Gabriel sometimes - and he's got a great sense of how to add effective melodic nuance at the right moment in really creative ways.

It is his sense of melody that really drives some of these songs. The opening track, Dream for Dreaming, has a very sweet falsetto melody in the chorus as he sings, "Don't you wish that we were just dreaming?". Even in this somewhat simpler song which features more of a consistent pulse and an ABAB structure, he never lets things get dull. He breaks into a completely different and very memorable verse melody in the second verse, something that works well because of how strong the chorus melodies are. He knows that he doesn't need to make the verses too repetitious, because you're gonna leave the song with that beautiful chorus stuck in your head, and that allows him to add a variation that makes the song that much more interesting and progressive.

But sometimes he's even more confident in the nuanced qualities of the song and doesn't even try for a chorus. The title track is one of those songs. Just the opening few seconds are so compelling and vivid that even without a distinct chorus this song is immediately recognizable. It's one of those tracks that as soon as it starts it drags you right into a familiar place; partly again due to his ability to write great vocal melodies, and in this case, to start off with one. That great vocal melody, introduced with a beautiful film-soundtrack-like symphonic swell into a fading piano line to begin the song makes it one of my favorite intros to any song this year. But I wouldn't rave about the intro if it wasn't setting up a fantastic song all together. This one builds up to be quite a dramatic song, flowing in congruence with the focused oceanic lyrical theme as he sings, "Just let the waves come crashing down / Let it wash over top of your life".

He really commits, maybe more so than any other album on my list this year, to a very consistent lyrical subject matter. Every song it seems has some mention of water or swimming. And the dreamy, layered, cascading arrangements all work to indulge this theme, right up until the final line of the last track, Here Comes the River, concluding the album on the lines, "Here comes the river, coming on strong / And you can't keep your head above these troubled waters / Here comes the river over the flames / Sometimes you got to burn to keep the storm away / Sometimes, sometimes you're cast adrift", amidst a characteristic shower of cinematic symphonics.

I feel like every year I end up comparing at least one artist to Radiohead. I probably would've avoided it with Patrick Watson if not for the second to last song, Drive, which gives me very distinct Radiohead vibes. It sounds a bit like OK Computer-era at first with the acoustic guitar chord progression and soft-sung vocals (reminds me a bit of the song Exit Music (For a Film)), but turns into a song more reminiscent of Radiohead's recent work with the way he layers in synths, piano and vocals, and the sort of trippy ending. I think it's safe to say after hearing this he's at least drawing a little bit of influence from them. But based on the whole juxtaposition between intimacy and atmosphere that I began with, I'm guessing they're quite strong reference point for him, as they're the kings of that type of contrast.

That's about the best comparison you can get from me though. And what Patrick Watson is doing here is certainly distinct in its own right. He's a little more on the singer-songwriter side of things. But he really goes out of his way to make his songs more interesting both from a harmonic perspective as well as from a production standpoint. And I get the impression that he's a very well-informed musician as well. One of my favorite songs on the record, Melody Noir, is essentially a dreamy latin waltz song adapted into his own style.

Considering how talented of a songwriter he is I'm actually surprised he isn't much more popular, at least within the indie scene. I feel like he's really flying under the radar. Since this was my first time listening to him I'm certainly going to go back and listen to his previous work. Based on how consistently colorful and thematic the music on this album I'm expecting there's a lot more for me to discover from Patrick Watson.

Speaking of Radiohead, we got a new album from frontman Thom Yorke this year called Anima. A lot of the time, a frontman's solo project is less unique and creative than his band, but Yorke seems to sort of isolate the really creative electronic elements of Radiohead and focus on them for his solo work and it's really interesting to hear. I love the longest song on the record, Twist, which starts off with some hefty, room-shaking beats but very smoothly and creatively metamorphoses into a dramatic and overwhelming string arrangement based ending.

Radiohead also officially put out a song called Ill Wind that was I guess on some sort of special edition of their last album. What do you want me to say? It's Radiohead. I love it. But I thought at first that it was a single for a new album and so that was quite depressing when I learned it wasn't...

12. TOOL - Fear Inoculum

For a lot of these reviews, I have to think for a little bit about what I'm gonna write before I start. Not for this album. Man, have I got a lot of opinions on this.

I have to start by saying, TOOL are probably the most important band in the development of my musical tastes. That's not to say at this point that they're my favorite band ever. I wouldn't say that. But the point that I discovered and got into them was the big turning point at which my tastes started to, uh, 'spiral out'.

How much of that is just because of timing and how much of it is because TOOL are an amazing band? A little bit of both I'd say. But certainly there a lot of people for whom they played a similar role in their lives. And as someone whose life revolves around playing and listening to music, I can't help but deify the band that sparked that passion more than any other.

Now, I know deification seems like a rather unequivocally positive thing. But when you're listening to a new album from a band whom you hold up so highly, that reverence becomes a bit of an obstacle of expectations standing in the way of pure enjoyment of the music. When that album's been in the making for 13 years, and it's the first time you've ever been able to experience an album from that artist as 'new' altogether, that reverence becomes an unshakable albatross.

But instead of me writing a dissertation on the psychology of listening to a new album, let's just skip ahead and talk about the music.

I really like the way that the album starts off with the title track. It does feel very familiar with the tabla and the delayed-bassline. But what I noticed about this song on first listen is how smooth everything starts to build in. If you listen back to every other TOOL record they've always been pretty quick to jump into some heavy riffage and kick things off with a bang. The way the initial groove comes in on this opener is very subtle; like they deliberately avoided attempting any sort of transition into it. It sort of gives me this specific feeling of 'Hey it's us, We were never gone and we don't need to make some sort of grand re-entrance to pull you back into our world'. I like that a lot, and because of that context this opening is very evocative for me.

When the vocals come in, it really reinforces that atmosphere. Maynard begins with some very light and melodic singing, and in some of the most meta lyrics I've ever heard, starts off with the words, "Immunity, long overdue". I really like his melodies here and the reverby production gives this verse a warm ambiance. It's a really beautiful way to open the album and it gives me this strange sense of comfort, especially as the lyrics develop and he breaks out into the chorus with the lines, "Exhale, expel".

This whole lyrical theme of breathing out and expelling a sickness of fear, delivered with Maynard's sort of ethereal authority, feels very real when I listen to this part. Even though, it's sort of because the sickness I felt like I was expelling on first listen was the long-term affliction not having any new TOOL music... But to their credit, I remember thinking on first listen how unique of an opportunity this was for them as artists to use this particular situation to raise a sense of rejuvenation and release, after all the tension built up over the years of anticipation for their new record. They actually capitalize on that circumstance with tremendous grace here. I also like how they really hold off on getting to the chorus, again, really utilizing the tension that everyone listening was going in with.

For that reason, that beginning just might be my favorite part of the album. Which is kind of a bad thing... I mean, you don't want the rest of an 80+ minute album to be inferior to the first few minutes. It's funny because, in a way, starting off with a theme so uniquely pertinent to how everyone was feeling going into the album makes it difficult to sound as relevant for the rest of the album unless you somehow manage to stretch that theme throughout the whole thing. In other words, nothing can really top that moment when you realize, 'Oh shit. TOOL is back!'. And because they really indulge that feeling in the beginning, the rest of the album has this sort of feeling of, 'Oh and we wrote some new songs too'. I mean, it doesn't ruin the other songs by any means. I'm being a bit dramatic. But I think the beginning of the title track does reach me on a deeper emotional level than any other point on the album for this reason, and maybe got me a little too excited that every moment on the album was gonna hit me that close to home so instantaneously.

Anyways, the way they flow back into the next set of verses, with a break of tabla drumming, again, is so smooth. And you know, I'm gonna say something probably unpopular with most TOOL fans. But hearing the first half of this song and comparing it to the rest of the album, I'd actually really like for them, if they ever release anything else, to take things in a much less heavy direction. I mean, I love TOOL as a heavy band. But the smoothness and grace through which they weave through sections in the first half of this song felt like a very tangible breakthrough of progress and maturity in their sound. And on the other side of things, the parts that seems most uninspired and derivative of themselves on this album (and there's a good amount of them), are generally the heavier sections.

Now, I do like the ending of this song (especially the sort of quasi-modulation downward on the riff at about nine minutes in). And, like a lot of TOOL fans, I'm totally excited by the idea of them being at peak heaviness. But, it's time to get negative...

Something that happens here, and pretty much all throughout the album, is that Maynard is pretty much excluded from the climax of the song. Historically, the vocals have always been integral to the apex of their compositions. Think about any great TOOL song; even songs where there is a distinct instrumental ending.

Forty-Six & 2: the big staccato riffage at the end is led into with a powerful and articulate section of vocals that give closure to the lyrical side of the song.

The Grudge: There's a big and heavy instrumental section at the end, but it's overlapped at first by a series of aggressive and rhythmic "let go"s (which again serves to tie up the lyrics) and transitions into it's peak with one final and emphasized scream. 

You can point to some other examples, but what you'll find looking at TOOL's pre-2019 discography is that the absolute pinnacle of intensity to pretty much every song was when everyone in the band, including, and often more importantly than anyone, Maynard, was firing at 100% intensity. And that's what made those songs so amazing. They weren't just climactic instrumental compositions with vocals thrown in when needed. They were cohesive emotional roller coasters with palpable meaning. In fact, Maynard's genius was always that his songs weren't just a fleeting emotion or passing circumstance, they were more like parables and legends, which he was always able to progress and resolve with some sort of moral by the ending. And yeah, it sounds pretentious, but it was so ambitious, and I think a lot of people understand how vital that element was to TOOL's music.

It wouldn't bother me so much, but it's pretty much the story of the album. For me specifically, my favorite genre of heavy music is post-metal, which is for the layman, just intense, long and climactic instrumental metal music. So generally speaking, I'm not really gonna be too impressed by these songs unless Maynard is really keeping my attention through to the end. And I will say, it's not that I think they should never do extended instrumental endings. Much of what they're doing here on this album instrumentally is great (note that the album is still on my favorite albums of the year list). They've just set such a high bar in the past, and no one can really hold a candle to it. They're not really doing it that way now, and so the music is really good but it's not legendary like what they've done before. And the worst part is, it seems like an easy fix. I mean I respect that Maynard chose to play a more reserved role and let what are TOOL's most sprawling long-form compositions to date breathe on their own. But it's nothing that he hasn't come up with vocal parts for before. And the fact that they're so long could've made his vocal climaxes so powerful, but for the same reason his absence is even more tangible.

I could be being way too critical here. But the weird thing is, I think his absence works the best in the song Descending, where he leaves the song about half-way through and never returns. There's two reasons for this.

Number one, is that the vocal performance of the first half of the song is fantastic, the most like a classic TOOL song, and mostly because he really builds up into some characteristically passionate vocals. The lyrics in this song seem to reflect upon the unnatural inactivity of modern life. I'm just interpreting it on my own, but I get a sense that this song is about someone coming face to face with their mortality in some manner, like getting diagnosed with cancer or something, and having a sort of enlightenment through their primal desperation to survive of how valuable life is and that mission to endure sort of uniting them spiritually. Well, it sounds like something a TOOL song would be about anyways. The profound lyrics and adamant delivery from Maynard converge perfectly with the instrumentation as the song really intensifies near the halfway point.

So although he leaves the song very early, his vocal part seems very complete. And the second reason it works better in this song is because the instrumental section feels justified. From the massive sounding slide guitar section up to the build up into the big gong hit (if you've heard the song you know what I'm talking about), it works really well. Is it up there with the best TOOL songs? No, I wouldn't say so. Because the vocals end so early it doesn't really have the same impact as some of the finales on some of their biggest endings. But it's a great song nonetheless and I could see how Maynard would choose to leave that jam on its own (although he didn't have to...).

 I feel a bit different about the length of the longest song on the record, 7empest, though there are plenty of elements that I love about this song. It starts off with some much welcome 90's sounding aggression both with a little bit more of a rocking instrumental, and some of Maynard's classic confrontationally gruff Undertow-era sounding vocals. And then it develops into a really killer arrangement of leads and riffs by guitarist Adam Jones. It's sort of a solo but also a sequence of riffs in a way. And whereas guitar solos have typically been over the same musical backdrop in the past for TOOL, the rhythm section really develops the music underneath for this whole long solo section in this case, helping to develop the song and move things along. And while this long section is great, it's the short reprisal at around 11-minutes in after Maynard's vocals come back in that really stands out for me. It's a biting solo that utilizes some very visceral guitar techniques. He really digs into the instrument and pulls off some nasty bends and pinch harmonics. And then he makes outstanding use of some turbulent chromatic notes (probably just played at random) and slides into a succession of a few more huge riffs as the rhythm section reaches an equally powerful culmination of intensity. I like how even though there's a break where the vocals come back in, it does feel connected to the previous long section of guitar soloing, and in a way the break makes for a much stronger ending to the whole solo when it comes back. Overall it's probably the best guitar solo, and best guitar work in general, that Adam Jones has ever put to record. He's not an amazing shredder or virtuoso but when he really focuses on tone, texture and melody he comes up with some gnarly stuff.

I love that part, but I find the few minutes that follow and end the song to be a bit disappointing. It's not bad. And some of the parts of the song are so good that I still think the song is worth listening to. But they just sort of spend a few minutes returning to the previous themes of the song in ways that are not so extraordinary. You can hear the compositional thought that informed this ending and it is cool how they're able to convene the main themes of the song at the end. But if your song is fifteen minutes long the ending better be pretty damn extraordinary. I don't wanna sound like a broken record but if there was some sort of really passionate and powerful vocal part at the end it would really justify the length of the song.

But alas, they don't do exactly what I want them to do. Woe is me. It's too bad that I can't really just separate all the hype from my actual enjoyment of the music. And I feel like I'll never really be able to discern how good the music on this album really is.

There's so much to love still though if I just stay positive. For one thing, this album may be Danny Carey's greatest performance. And I already thought he was pretty much the best rock drummer ever. If any album has the best drummer ever's best performance ever that means that it must be a great album. Right? Right???

Seriously, though. You can really tell at some points on this record that Danny Carey had a lot of time to think about his parts. The end of the song Invincible goes absolutely nuts with the way he switches up the timing. And its not just the complexity of it that makes it so cool; the fills he pulls off in between those switches all throughout the second half of the song are absolutely captivating. By the last few minutes he's basically taken control of the song in a way that few rock and metal drummers are even capable of.

Just because of his playing on this one, I feel that this song is maybe the most forward-thinking track on the album. More than any TOOL song before, there are points in this one where Adam and Justin are essentially just playing supporting roles to Danny, just chugging percussively in ways that provide a rhythmic foothold for him to dance around and work his magic. With Danny leading the charge, they really push the limits of their rhythmic complexity to new lengths.

This song also has some of the least derivative playing on the album, as the somewhat clean palm-muted riff that begins the song has an interesting and long sort of implied chord progression to it, which is great to my ears because a lot of TOOL's music lacks any serious harmonic movement in that way, which is part of the reason why some of the stuff on this record does seem so frustratingly rehashed from their past. For that reason as well, this song may be the biggest advancement of the TOOL sound that we have on this album. There's not much going on here that feels too similar to their past work.

This progression appears throughout the song with varying levels of intensity, serving as a theme, and working like many of their greatest songs to create a cohesive melodic narrative throughout the song via repetition and development. In other words, the song is really well-written because it has a recognizable theme upon which nearly every element of the song is based. Even Maynard's vocals observe a very consistent relationship to this progression. So even though Maynard doesn't break out into any awe-inspiring vocal parts on this song as I've lamented before, it doesn't bother to me so much this time because the writing is so focused and he has a great base melody for the song, and the lyrics that go with them are quite poignant as well.

Also I really like how they let Danny go all out in the ending of this song as I said before. To some extent, it's nice to just get more insight into what he's really capable of doing with his instrument.

I do like the second track Pneuma. I've heard more praise for this song than any other and even some people saying it's one of their best songs ever. To me this is the most derivative song they've come out with and so it's a little hard for me to fully get on board with it. But I will say the bridge section is awesome and one of my favorite moments on the album. And overall the ending is pretty powerful too. It could be a little bigger if you ask me, but what are you gonna do? It's a cool song. I can dig it. Everything's fine. I'm not disappointed...

I do feel like the riff that the verses lead into and that the song ends with is a little weak. I mean, it's not weak weak, but it's definitely weak for thirteen years worth of writing if you know what I mean... I like it better at the end when there's a lead over it. Maybe if they just took the second one out and drifted straight into the building bridge section from the second verse it would be a lot more climactic when it came back at the end with the lead over it. The way it stands now I think it sounds really predictable and a bit dull that they bring it back at the end because they've already spent a fair amount of time on it. If it only happened once at the end of the first verse, then their unexpected diversion away from it at the end of the second verse would build tension and make the whole bridge and climactic variation of the verse at the end feel like an extension of that tension until they release it by bringing that riff back at the end. Maybe next time...

Oh yeah, and for one last negative thing, I don't really like the song Culling Voices. I like the first half alright, though I feel it's a bit too sparse. But the ending is the most extreme example of the need for a big vocal part. Instead, we're left with a surprisingly boring instrumental excuse for a climax. It's the only moment on the album that I'm really kind of shocked they thought it was worth putting on the album...

So overall there's tons of stuff I like here. But just because of circumstances this album was never going to satisfy me unless it was the greatest album of all time. Nearly always when I review a long album like this I say something to the effect of, 'if they only cut this and that out this would have been a great album'. But even if I were to trim this album down exactly the way I want to I'd still be disappointed because all TOOL albums are a full physical CD length and after 13 years if we didn't get 80-minutes of absolute musical perfection it wouldn't be enough.

All things being equal I don't think any of the songs on here match up against any of the best material on their previous albums (the last three at least, Undertow is harder to compare because the songwriting is so different). On the one hand, the compositions are very thoughtful and cohesive, and it's not like the songs need to be cut down for the most part. But also there's not really any musical ideas as entrancing as the riff in Schism, or as brutaly funky as the groove in The Pot, or... well I could go on for quite a while. But who cares? We got a new TOOL album and there's some great stuff on here.

Okay, yeah, I care... It was just so hard for me to consume this damn thing. And I waited so long for it. But you never know, maybe I'll revisit this album a few years from now and realize it's just as good as everything else they've done.

I'm determined to end on a positive note so I will say that in a way, this whole experience has made me appreciate new music even more. Greatness in art is so fleeting and even a band of this legendary caliber can take 13 years to make something not as good (but still pretty good) as their previous material. It really makes you grateful for the artists who are in their prime right now making amazing, forward-thinking and fresh music. Keep that silver lining in mind as you keep reading further down my list to the artists who aren't disappointing me right now (but probably will someday... goddammit TOOL, you've ruined me).

Another highly anticipated album by a very popular band, though not nearly as anticipated or long-awaited, was the new Black Keys album Let's Rock (so different TOOL but I had nowhere else to put this). Similar to TOOL unfortunately this is probably my least favorite Black Keys album... But I've been a pretty consistent fan of them - I love their early garage stuff, but I do really like a lot of the newer stuff, and I dissented from a lot of people on the last album, which I actually thought was one of their best and most artistically focused projects yet. This is maybe their least artistically focused LP, but you know what, after getting through some initial disappointment (they sort of marketed this as a return to their roots), I did come to appreciate how succinct of a blues-pop style they've been able to cultivate. I think there's a lot of really well-written songs on this album and they do have a really distinct sound. The opening track for example, Shine a Little Light, is a damn catchy song, and if you listen to all the layers and tones on it you'll hear how effectively they utilize the electric guitar to make a great pop tune.

It's worth mentioning that we should be grateful, even if we don't get exactly what we want from them, that these bands do stick around for so long to give us more music. A small time indie rock band named Jakals that I'm a big fan of released an EP called Marvelous Houses this year and then subsequently broke up. It's unfortunate because that EP featured one of my favorite songs of the year, the title track, which exemplified their unique, uber-climactic indie rock style with sublimely impassioned vibrato-laced female vocals. It's the last song on the EP, therefore the last song they'll ever release, but it's also the best song they've ever released, with a beautifully melodic chorus, a southern tinge, and a massive outro. The quality of this song makes it so bittersweet, as who knows what they could've created in the future. Maybe they could've gotten huge and then taken thirteen years to release a pretty good album that I would've been disappointed in because my expectations were too high.

11. Brutus - Nest

Brutus are just the coolest fucking band. I mean, for Stefanie Mannaerts to play drums the way that she does well singing those high energy punk vocals is one of the few instances where the word unbelievable can be used literally. But we're talking about the best albums of the year, and whether or not the drummer is singing, it shouldn't matter in that context. So let's neglect that obvious attraction to the band, and focus on how this is one of the most solid rock releases of the year.

To start, I think that Brutus have a great mix of influences. Punk and post-hardcore are obviously there, but I hear a lot of post-rock, shoegaze, and even blackgaze maybe. These influences work together fantastically with their sound because they get a great balance of raw, punk energy and very dynamic and inspiring emotional highs. On a song like Cemetery, they come jumping out of the gates with  manifest aggression, both instrumentally and vocally. But they do a phenomenal job of building that song into a much more open and melancholic place. Inversely, on Techno, they start off with a lighter, more melodic feel that gets even softer as the song goes on, but in the final portion of the songs they regain their punk footing and Mannaerts goes full hardcore, screaming the hook on last time with much more vocal distortion than I knew she was capable of.

The best example of these dynamics are on the song War, which is more unlike anything from their 2017 debut than any other song on this new album. I really like the distinct linear structure to this track. It starts off like a ballad with just clean guitar and reverbed-out vocals, then breaks into what is the most metal riff on the album, and makes it way into one of their best shoegazy-type, loud, emotive climaxes (even incorporating the melodies from the clean intro), and of course just briefly returning back to the intro at the end to ensure that essential cohesive closure to a song of this kind. I'd be really excited to hear them do more songs like this in the future.

I saw Brutus on tour earlier this year, and yes, seeing her nail these songs live both vocally and on the kit was an absolute sight to behold. But I remember that when I first started listening to Brutus over two years ago, that I loved their music well before I knew that the singer and drummer were the same person.

One reason it works so well is that she writes great vocal melodies. Listen to what she's singing in Carry and you'll realize how big of a benefactor that is in making that song memorable. It's very interesting because you can tell to an extent that, rhythmically, she writes rather straight vocal parts that are compatible with her fast-paced drumming. But even going into this album knowing that she's doing both, I've realized that the creative melodic intervals she comes up with within those rhythmic limitations make it so that she doesn't have to sacrifice any intensity or passion on either end. It's funny because that's what makes her vocals sound so punk as well, because historically many punk singers have been guitarists and bassists who, in many cases, didn't have the coordination to take a lot of liberty with their voices in a rhythmic sense while they were strumming their power chord riffs.

What she's doing is a million times harder, but it still has that raw energy that you get from punk vocals because of that 'yelling while playing your instrument' feel. But because she's actually a very good singer, with a really distinct voice, and a great sense of melody, the whole product is something incredibly powerful, and something that is totally unique to her and the band. So far, two albums in, that unique sound has blown me away and endeared me to them in a way I could say of very few modern bands.

10. Fire! Orchestra - Arrival

Who says that avant-garde big band jazz can't have lyrical lead vocals? This kind of music has such a rich history on the instrumental side of things that I've never really heard anyone bother to ask.

I've listened to the Fire! Orchestra before, and they have always incorporated crazy vocal performances into their long, chaotic jams. But this album is different. The singing is structured and lyrical in ways that are so atypical of this genre. It was so surprising to me on first listen to hear how integrated the vocals were, and listening to it has changed my mind about what's possible with jazz music all together.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that having lyrical vocals in jazz is anything new. And part of the surprise was my familiarity with this band and their past releases, and how different they were from this. But what makes this record distinct is how they don't really sacrifice the long, sprawling, and improv heavy nature of the music to fit the vocals in.

The opening track, (I am a) Horizon, develops very slowly, as the variety of brass and strings intensify a little bit in between every verse. Again, these are not pop songs, they are long-form avant-garde jazz pieces, and they make sure to emphasize that right from the beginning, not making any effort to jump into the more accessible aspects of their sound. As the band becomes more and more involved, it begins to create a cinematic backdrop, and the vocals become more impassioned. Yet, this song serves as just a little taste of how intense the Fire! Orchestra are capable of becoming.

The next song, Weekends (The Soil is Calling), takes things in a far zanier direction. The verse vocals in this one really take the lead, repeating variations of a long, winding and acrobatic melody over an upbeat groove, that functions as the most memorable part of the song. There's a sort of psychedelia to the way they break out of the verses, with a rather hard to follow pattern of interplay and counterpoint between the two vocalist amidst an ambiance of amelodic and arhythmic instrumentation. They make it sound like there's a lot delay on the vocals the way they overlap each other but I'm pretty sure it's just the weird arrangement between them.

Things get very avant-garde in the second half as a long and noisy saxophone solo, with a building instrumental backdrop, leads things back into the final verse. This part I think shows the uniformity of songwriting to an extent, as they would normally use a building solo like that to get back to the main melodic motif of the song, but here they use it to get back to the memorable vocal part, a motif in and of itself. They then give that motif some extra repetitions and add some extra instrumentation and soloing on top of it to create a strong climax.

Something really appealing about this unique approach to jazz is that lyrical vocals really give you something to latch onto, especially when they have good melodies like these. Often times, it can be a bit hard to find anything to latch onto in these crazier types of jazz music. That chaos has a certain appeal to it of course, but the vocals don't really take anything away from that in this case. They just make the music that much more unique.

What's genius about how they incorporate vocals on this album, is that they extend this philosophy beyond the individual songs on the album, and use a few softer and (relatively) shorter tracks that really leave space for the vocals to create a dynamic in the track listing against the longer, wilder songs. And what makes this such an outstanding album is that these songs aren't interludes, they're beautiful, fully fleshed out vocal jazz songs.

Given the context, I was shocked when I first heard the song Blue Crystal Fire. What an incredibly beautiful song.  I love the way they utilize both vocalists here. When Sofia Jernberg begins singing in the first verse, her uncannily higher ranged voice is absolutely angelic and immediately trance-inducing. Then when the second verse comes in, and Mariam Wallentin's lower, more textural voice takes the reigns, singing, "Deep within the forest", it creates a lovely contrast that feels like we've gotten much more up close and personal to whatever magical scene we're involved in. And then when their voices sync up and harmonize in the final section of lyrics, the song really ascends up into the heavens. It's amazing that within this wacky avant-garde big band album lies one of the most elegant and gorgeous songs of the year. The other instruments are only used to light effect here, though they do a great job setting the atmosphere. It's a total dream-state of a song, and I can never believe that it's over seven minutes long cuz it goes by so quickly.

The final track too, At Last I Am Free, is a more atmospheric and vocal-centric track. This one has a little bit of a bluesy soul to it vocally, and Wallentin really sings her heart out - you can feel the distinguished strain of her voice when she sings the line "all this hurt and pain inside, I feel". Her vocals have a sort of harrowing frailness to them - technically a fast natural vibrato, but whereas with some singers it feels okay to just point out they have a nice vibrato, hers sounds so authentically like a quivering voice of someone in pain, which I think is why we appreciate vibrato psychologically in the first place, it only feels appropriate to describe it that way. 

Overall, the vocal work on this album is what blows my mind more than anything. Having two singers of this caliber with such contrastingly distinct voice is such an asset to their sound, both in the softer and the crazier songs.

At times you may mistake some of Jernberg's singing for some high-pitched saxophone overtones, or maybe chirping bird samples. She uses some sort of technique that I'm not very familiar with to hit some ridiculously high notes. But for more than just that experimental aspect of her vocals, Jernberg deserves a ton of credit, as although Wallentin takes the lead more often, Jernberg's very prominent high harmonies add so much to this album. It wouldn't be the same without it.

The high-pitch imrpov stuff is pretty cool though - I gotta hand it Jernberg, especially how she incorporates it at the end of the fourth track, Silver Trees. This is the centerpiece of this album in many ways, and its the longest track on the record at almost sixteen minutes total. This one seems like the culmination of everything that they're trying to do. It builds up very powerfully with a bass-led melodic motif, and peaks at the craziest and freest moment on the album, with brass instruments screeching left and right. It sounds here like both Jernberg and Wallentin join in on the improvised fun too. Amidst all the more traditional experimental big band chaos the improvised vocals fit in very well and give a bit more humanity to this kind of part.

I just love how all over the place this album is. There's stuff than anyone's grandma could listen to and there's stuff that 99% of people wouldn't touch, and I think that their ability to pull off both so well has a great effect of amplifying the strengths of each individual moment. Also, the fact that the slower tracks are so genuinely emotional I think makes the album as a whole feel a bit more serious. Whereas albums that only seek to sound crazy end up being a little hard to identify with, listening to this album as a whole takes you on quite the roller coaster of emotions and definitely leaves you feeling more than just discombobulated like the way some really chaotic jazz albums do.

The Fire! Orchestra have managed with this album to transform themselves into one of the most forward-thinking and exciting jazz bands out there, so long as they continue pioneering this more vocally-focused brand of avant-garde jazz that they've conceived this year. It's not easy to just form a big band jazz group and so I'm extra appreciative that this band exists and that they're making an effort to break new ground in this way. Next time they release a new album I won't be surprised by beautiful songs like Blue Crystal Fire. In fact, I'll be expecting them. And maybe they'll surprise me again. Who knows? They've got my attention and I can't wait to see where they take it.

9. Maggie Rogers - Heard it in a Past Life

There's this weird thing going on with pop music where I keep discovering pop artists before they get huge. My #1 album last year, Rosalía's El Mal Querer, was extra sweet for me because I was listening to her back in 2017 when she released her debut acoustic flamenco album. And if you look back on my 2017 review, I placed her song De Plata on my top 25 songs list and even wondered out loud whether she would pursue pop music next.

Well oddly enough, in 2017 I also placed a song called Dog Years from Maggie Rogers' EP on my list. That EP was a pop release and even featured two songs that are on this new LP, so it wasn't nearly as much of a leap as it was with Rosalía. But still, I caught on to that EP quite soon after it was released, and I knew she had something special before she was doing TV spots or anything like that.

The point I'm trying to make here isn't that I'm a genius. I think now that I've been doing this music review stuff for a while, and as I've opened my ears up to this kind of music, let go of any embarrassment, and acknowledged how fundamentally appealing the sound of modern electro-pop is, it's becoming clear to me that it's a genre with infinite possibilities, and I think I can hear when someone is doing something special with it.

The song Alaska was one of the two featured on her EP in 2017 that made it to this album, and it's the blueprint for what makes her sound so special. Looking back I'm surprised I didn't put this song on my list in 2017. Like I said, I chose the song Dog Years, a great song, but this was really the one that blew my mind with how beautifully organic and subtly integrated the pop elements were. It's a shame because it would feel weird putting it on my top songs list this year since I've known it for over two years now, but I just want to emphasize how revolutionary of a pop song this is.

It does have a driving, subby dance-pop beat, but everything about it is produced with a modest touch. You can always hear the intimate singer-songwriter song forming the foundations of her compositions, and that's what makes her music so appealing to me. A lot of pop music just doesn't feel genuine, and that's a problem because pop music is so vocally-centered. If you don't buy the emotion in what they're singing, it's just dull.

Even though it's the least representative of her style on this album, I think it's important to point out a song in the middle of the album called Past Life, which is a piano and single vocal track song. I'm glad she included one song like this, and I think it works really well on the album to show you what a stripped down song of hers sounds like, sort of giving the rest of the album context.

I'm happy to say that she does stay pretty committed to her rootsy-pop sound throughout the album. The closest completely new song to the sound that initially attracted me to her in 2017 is the song Fallingwater. Right down to the naturey lyrical subject matter, the organic sound of songs like this work to manifest that lovely juxtaposition that she evokes between the natural and the modern (though I wish the kick was a little softer on this one, like in Alaska).

I think it needs to be mentioned as well, before it seems like I'm saying that all she has going for her is this unique novelty of contrasting styles, that one thing that the quality of her music is completely contingent on is the fantastic and emotional songwriting at it's core. I'd put her vocal melodies and voice up against just about any pop star out there today. It's totally apparent on this song, from the immediately gripping melodies that begin the verse to the powerfully high ad-libbing that saturates the ending.

And so it's not necessarily the songs on this album that invest the most deeply in her unique blend of folk and pop that are my favorites. Generally its true that those are the ones that catch my ear. But I found myself returning to the song Retrograde more than any other, which isn't the most 'naturey' sounding song on the record. But the raw emotion of the chorus hits me so hard, as she seems to sing about having some sort of personal regression or mental breakdown, with lyrics like, "Here I am, settled in, crying out / Finding all the things that I can't do without / I am giving in / I'm in retrograde". She writes some stunning melodies and this is the case here, but more so she just belts these lyrics with such emotion it makes you forget about any of the technical aspects of the music.

There's some subtle choices I love about her writing that this song makes good example of as well. Except for the very ending, the chorus lyrics are completely different in the first and second chorus. And there's no third chorus, as after the bridge she elects to close things with some sort of thematic campfire-song head voice melodies. One of my favorite parts of the song is in the second half of the second verse where she leaves a little extra space between her lyrics and really breaks away from the regular lower-range verse melody to passionately build up and belt the lines "Feeling all I've ever known / Fall away and letting go / Oh, come out of the darkness". As I mentioned, because on the surface this song doesn't sound like the most unique on the record, it confuses me a little bit why it stands out so much. But considering all these fundamental elements of songwriting that she executes and plays with so effectively, I'm reminded that I do actually just really like pop music, and when you have a songwriter like Maggie Rogers, any song could be my new favorite.

I was on a flight earlier this year at some point after this album came out, and I remember when we landed the last song on this record, Back in my Body, started playing on the speakers. It's another one of her songs that just feels so homey and personal, and serves as a great concluding track in it's feeling of spiritual closure after an album of personal struggle. I had this epiphany, that after taking pride in listening to pretentiously complex and obscure music for so long, I was now a fan of the kind of inoffensive music that they play on the airplane or in the supermarket. I mean, that's such an unfair characterization of Maggie Rogers' emotional and personal art. But at the same time, I'm sure there are a lot of boring middle aged moms and awkward 12-year old girls for whom Maggie Rogers is their new favorite artist.

I'm okay with that though. I always talk about how I appreciate an artist with a vision. Maggie Rogers has incredible vision for her music, and lucky for her that vision appeals to many more people than most of the compelling artistic visions that a lot of my other favorite artists have. It doesn't make it any less artistic.

I would kill to hear her really throw the shackles off and just go head first into making a Björkian art pop record that really doubles down on the organic and folky elements in her sound, somewhat like how Rosalía approached her album last year. I guess that is why Rosalía was my #1 in 2018 and Rogers is just high on my list this year. But if that's what she wants to do she'll do it. You can hear that everything she's doing comes from a place of authenticity, which is the most important part. She writes her music and is heavily involved in the production, and based on the quality of some of the songs on here, even if she doesn't go down the art pop road, she could make a #1 album of the year. She's just that talented of a songwriter. 

What other pop did I like this year, you ask?

I enjoyed the pop-oriented, and sometimes hip-hop infused R&B on the Jamila Woods album LEGACY! LEGACY!. I was hooked by catchy yet passionate songs like Baldwin, which features a lot of brass and has some great vocal melodies, and it has three distinct parts that could be considered a hook. I love the choir harmonies in the refrain. She also delivers these socially-conscious lyrics with a lot of passion, especially here but just in general as a concept for the album. My favorite song is the brooding hip-hop track Sun Ra however. After naming a hip-hop song my favorite song of the year two years in a row, I was quite disappointed in the genre this year, but this track was the one saving grace for me. It's like an advanced form of hip-hop where all the rappers can also sing really well and they flow between different vocal styles seamlessly. The fact that on the one song she really commits to hip-hop on she makes a innovative and high quality track for that genre is quite impressive. This was another one that was really close to being in my top 25.

I also found the somewhat experimental production of the new FKA Twigs album MAGDALENE, which stylistically contains an interesting blend of R&B and what sounds sometime likes English folk music or classical. The opening track, Thousand Eyes, starts off in this very archaic sounding manner, but gradually brings in some really angelic higher range vocals over some distorted, industrial-sounding synths as the song goes on. In a way, this is sort of what I'd imagine Kate Bush would sound like if she was just coming out today. The second track, Home With You, is also super interesting with it's very genuine, ballady, piano-based chorus but rather heavy, messed-up sounding industrial verses.

8. Bent Knee - You Know What They Mean

Whose been more prolific than Bent Knee these past few years? They put out LPs in 2016 and 2017, and released a new half hour long live composition with a percussion ensemble in 2018. Of course they had close out the decade with another full-length. Despite the high quantity of output, all of their last three albums have been among my favorites in their respective years. Bent Knee never lets me down and this record is no exception.

I said this when they released their last album, but it's true yet again, they've never rocked harder than on this new release. The first song on the album, Bone Rage, is one of my go to head-banging songs of the year. It's built around a simple riff but as usual the way they compose and execute is what sets them apart. They way they modulate the riff up through the verses gives the song amazing forward momentum. The production and guitar tones really stick out in this song and on the album as a whole as well. Everything sounds chunky as hell.

Bent Knee are the masters at being heavy and fun at the same time, and after the massive hard rock verses build up the band releases into a very groovy, odd-time yet deceptively danceable section in this song. You can just feel the energy of the band on this song; even if it's not a live recording it sounds like it is. The high vocal scoop at the end that leads back into a short reprise of the main riff and the sort of snippy way she cuts of the vocals at the last minute are another great example of how they blend a fun sort of confidence into their heaviest moments sometimes to give it a unique vitality; like a glowing smile as you violently bang your head up and down.

As they focus more on these kind of hard rock songs Courtney Swain's vocals just keep getting more eccentric, which is especially great because of how technically skilled of a singer she is. Her willingness to to try and make herself sound wild like this makes their music so lively, like at the end of the song Give us the Gold, where the mounting energy of her frantic singing creates a uniquely rambunctious ending that you could only find in a Bent Knee song.

They actually reach what is the heaviest moment of their career thus far on the song Lovemenet, which is musically a raw serving of slow-burning stoner or sludge metal. The clever interplay between the lead vocals and the backing vocals, whether it's sort of a melodic back and forth as in the verses, or the shouting that interjects the chorus, give this track a punky sort of hostility; as if lead singer Courtney Swain is yelling at you, but she's also got a gang of equally angry people standing behind her with their fists raised in the air ready to back her up. For some reason they all really care whether you love her or not. What are friends for?

It's also maybe their simplest song yet. It's pretty much just a riff of quarter notes, and the entire 5-minute song just repeats that riff with different dynamics. For a band that has sort of gained popularity and risen up within the prog scene to some extent, this song is defiantly simple. But as is standard for them, they're able to justify a full song's-worth of material by focusing on the details. This song features some very noisy production - almost too much, but in a way that artistically allows them to keep it from being too much of a 'meat & potatoes' heavy metal jam. It's not just a heavy song. It's abrasive. It's nasty. They really put everything into this caustic aesthetic as well, as after a brief slow down to start the bridge, they just start to shower the listener with noise. What I think's is going on here is the violin player is just gradually sliding up his instrument with his fingers non-incrementally while shredding with his bow, while using a ton of reverb or delay, and maybe some distortion. Again, it's a pretty simple idea, but file this whole song under that much sought after category of simple genius, as they really know how to take an basic idea like that and run with it.

I also love the album flow, which is something they always put a lot of care into. I never want to listen to Lovemenot without hearing the ambient dissonance that ends that song fade into the softest, daintiest song on the record, Bird Song. Although it's a beautiful and almost sort of friendly song, it's also notable for the distortion on the vocals, which in a way connects it to the previous track despite their extreme contrast of emotions. It's a great comedown, together they serve as a sort of turning point in the album.

The record ends much less rock n' roll and more atmospheric, and feeling like there's been a noticeable progress of emotions throughout the whole experience. The third to last song, Garbage Shark, stands as a unique sort of dark industrial track with some horror soundtrack elements. It builds up a ton of atmosphere and tension, leading into a very dramatic and heavy climax with an intensely eerie reverbed out violin lead, and ends on a fittingly hesitant and disorienting, heavy yet spacious groove.

That song then fades into what seems like it's opposite, a track called Golden Hours. This song uses ambient and cinematic sounds to create a dense soundscape as well, and building up into a climax like the previous track, but instead of the ominous vibe of that song, this time it's a grand and radiant climax almost reminding me of a post-rock song. Again, not only are these songs great but they really dictate listening to the next track because of how much that flow enhances the songs.

I really like how the album is broken up this way. It's pretty apparent; the first half is rock n' roll jam after jam, and the second half is an emotional ebb and flow of lightness and darkness. And what's really worth taking notes on for musicians is how they use this structure to highlight two songs on the album in particular.

Hold Me In, is the only song on the first half that doesn't feel so much like a hard rock jam, but instead incorporates more of those atmospheric elements into a ballad-ish kind of composition. It's still definitely a groovy rock song. But with the heavily delayed and emotional vocals, and the prominent synths, this song is more reminiscent of the vibes on the second half of the album while still retaining the momentum of the first half with it's dancey sort of beat.

The slow down in the bridge is a really great moment, and although their lead singer is amazing, they have the bass player sing lead for a few lines in this soft section (she's got a great voice as well and delivers some beautiful melodies in this spot). This gives the song a sense of temporary detachment, emphasized by a sort of radio-transmission effect on her voice. It makes it much more powerful when lead singer Courtney Swain's vocals come back in with a very tight delay and only accompanied by some light guitar playing, before the song explodes into the emotional finale. It's very moving how the song goes from distant, to intimate, to totally grandiose like that. Her vocal performance is outstanding at the end, and even for some reason reminds me of Layne Staley right on the last note she hits.

The other song that mirrors the placement of Hold Me In in the sense of its contrast to the vibe of that half of the album is Catch Light, the only real rocking song on the second half of the album, and one of my favorites. This song has a real driving rhythm to it in the verses, and I fawn over the tone of that brutish and almost startlingly loud distorted synth that comes in every time I hear it (they must be running a keyboard through a dirty amp or distortion pedal or something). The ending of this song is magnificent too, and somehow combines both their rock n' roll energy and their inspiring emotional spirit into one very gratifyingly drawn out moment.

I don't know how intentional the way the structured this album is. I mean, it's structured intentionally obviously, but I'm not sure if they thought deliberately about segregating the more rock-oriented songs to the first half, and the more atmospheric songs to the second half, and then specifically switched two of them. But aside from the first song, Hold Me In and Catch Light were the singles from the album so it seems like that could have definitely been a way of emphasizing those two within the album flow. Either way, the fact that I get so hung up on something like that is a testament to the artistry of Bent Knee. Whether it's creating profoundly arranged track listings, or expanding simple ideas in ways no one else would think, they just always do things that are inspiring from an artist's perspective.

If Bent Knee hadn't released an album this year I very well might have placed frontwoman Courney Swain's solo album Between Blood and Ocean on this list (not because it disqualifies her but just because she was close to making the list in general). It's a really diverse album, and as if Bent Knee releasing their most rocking album yet wasn't enough, this album as well features one of my favorite rock tunes of the year, with the song Black Sheep. This song has some really great, bluesy vocal melodies and builds up into a huge, anthemic rock n' roll ending. And man, she nails her belting parts with such spirit, it's such a gift to get two LP's with her on lead vocals this year.

There's a few other releases that I'd recommend if you like this Bent Knee record. Both are very theatrical female fronted bands.

The first is a selft-titled album by Rosalie Cunningham who makes some kind of Jefferson Airplane sounding psychedelic rock music. The opening track, Ride on my Back, opens up the album with to-die-for fuzzy guitar tones and uses them to create one of my favorite riffs of the year (I particularly love the dark little turnaround in the fourth bar of the riff). This is song rocks so hard and is also really catchy - if the whole album was like this it would've been one of my absolute favorites of the year. The rest of the album is pretty good though, and I love the powerful vocal performance in the next song, Fuck Love.

Secondly is an album that is much less rock than any of these but way more theatrical. I'd say it's a sort of vaudeville jazz album in fact, and it's called La Fine del Futuro by Tredici Bacci. I really like a lot of the instrumentals here and even though it's not rock it kind of seems like they're subtlety pulling from some psychedelic and progressive rock influences at some points. Also, the song In the 1970's is one grandest and catchiest songs of year, and develops into a really fantastic vocal performance. It's kind of overly-dramatic but in a totally amusing way.

7. Ioanna Gika - Thalassa

As great of a year as it's been for pop music, most of the pop that I've liked, I've wished that it was a bit more sonically experimental and a bit more on the art pop side of things. Plenty of pop artists are taking inspiration from Kate Bush and Björk, of course, but I don't necessarily see anyone in the mainstream as carrying that torch of excessively creative pop. Looking a little out of the mainstream however, you have artist like Ioanna Gika, who like the aforementioned legendary pop artists, makes pop music that doesn't really feel like pop music. The music on her 2019 debut is not very consistently catchy or dance-y. Instead, she uses the electro-pop format to create music that is haunting, otherworldly, and most of all, epic.

I think what gives this album such a memorable thematic sound overall is the powerful juxtaposition of modern and archaic sounds. This contrast is introduced immediately on the first track Roseate, beginning with an archaic sounding harp line and light, somewhat liturgical vocals, but within seconds transitions in surprisingly fluid fashion into a thick, almost techno-like electronic synth melody with electronic drums. All this tied together by her heavenly, reverby vocals and cryptically ancient sounding lyrics. The track continues to weave smoothly between different sounds as it moves forward. The way she develops the second verse is particularly interesting, as the hard electronic beat of the first chorus gives way to a light, clean guitar and acoustic drumkit variation of the verse, and gradually morphs back into the previously used electronic instrumentation, making a very powerful build up into the second chorus, which is played at a double-time tempo relative to the first time, and precedes a climactic and intense choral-based outro. The chorus may be the part that you have stuck in your head after, but overall the song is a lot more than a chorus, and is extremely well-composed in a way that progresses consistently and leads up to a huge ending. I wish this kind of structure and penchant for variation were more common place among pop artists in general.

The unique mixture of electronic and acoustic instrumentation continues throughout the album, as does the climactic song structure. On the second track, Out of Focus, things build up into a massive swell of vocal layers, triumphant horns, and harpsichord (I think). It all sounds very epic and not of this time, but underneath all that olden instrumentation, is a rapid and sporadic electronic drum groove that reminds me a lot of 2000's Radiohead, which I'm sure is a big influence on her.

My favorite moment of cleverly arranged instrumentation is in the song Messenger, however. This song is preceded by an intro track that shares the name of the album, with more mixtures of ancient and futuristic sounds, including some very old sounding non-English chanting vocals, that build up into the electronic drum groove that begins Messenger. This song has great vocal melodies in the verses, but as I was saying, the part that makes me love this song is the transition near the end from the more electronic based section that follows the verse into a beautifully arranged instrumental section of Vivaldi-esque violins (maybe violas and cellos as well). I'm not sure but it sounds like part of what's going on may be a heavy delay set on the strings to make them really cascade over each other (it could just be several different tracks though). Of course, there are variety of other electronic, percussive and vocal layers going on here. It all creates a very one-of-a-kind intensity and atmosphere. I could see myself listening to this kind of dense classical meets electronic music in and of itself, but building up to something like this the way that she does in this quasi-pop format is absolutely brilliant.

A lot of pop music tends to suffer from a sort of pettiness, i.e. the generic relatability of a lot of it seems like it's not coming from a genuine place. Ioanna Gika's biggest strength is that while her music is best categorized as pop, the feel of her music is very grand and epic, and thus much different than most anything else that falls into that category. None of these songs feature generic pop lyrics, and in fact, everything about her music is quite enigmatic, both lyrically and musically. If you listen to a song like New Geometry, the symphonic intro immediately places you in a mysterious world, and as the electronic elements kick in, it's like you're dancing through the halls of some ancient temple. I love the simple melodic hook she uses in this one too, which makes use of her gorgeously powerful head voice.

Drifting is one of the most effective closing tracks of the year, as it features the most sparse instrumentation of any song on the album. And what I think is really genius, is that instead of starting slow and building up with electronic elements and fuller instrumentation like most songs on the record, this song sort of mirrors the dynamic of the whole album by starting with denser, symphonic production, but slowly becomes less dense. The second verse strips down to just e-piano, vocal, and some background synths, and for the last chorus, all that's left is a single, almost operatic sounding vocal track and simple piano chords, ending tersely on the last vocal note. It's a profoundly secluded and intimate moment, yet still quite epic and tinged with ominous darkness, as she repeats "don't go drifting too far from the shore". It's as if we're hearing the proverb espoused by the narrator of some age-old Greek tragedy as the protagonist gets sucked beneath the waves and the curtains close.

Most pop artists aren't really interested in writing something bigger than themselves. And I'm not saying that's always a bad thing. Some people have interesting stories to tell. And I'm not saying that Ioanna Gika makes music that isn't personal. But something that all great artists have in common is the ability to aggrandize their stories and make them into something awe-inspiring. On this record, Ioanna Gika isn't making catchy songs to dance to or hum along with on the radio. She's using pop music to form mythical worlds and dramatic sagas. Only a few years ago I had basically written of all electro-pop music as being dull and only interesting to those with limited taste in music, but going into 2020, Ioanna Gika is showing me that pop can be as grand and epic as any genre out there, if the artist only has that vision.

As far as other art pop goes this year, I did quite in joy the highly praised new album by Weyes Blood, Titanic Rising. There is some sort of connection within her approach to harmony and melody that makes her sound somewhat like The Beach Boys and The Beatles. That's a great thing, and I really love the intense melancholia of a songs like Andromeda and Wild Time. I do think that she could vary things up a bit more instrumentally, maybe more electronic elements or some brass or something. Anyhow, really captivating songwriting on this.

I'll mention Angel Olsen's new album as well, titled All Mirrors. This one has some really colorful production, with huge walls of synths and strings, but also quite a retro sound stylistically. I really enjoy how those production layers are used to explode into the climax of the title track - really wonderful string arrangements in the build-up.

6. Angles 9 - Beyond Us

When Angles 9 came out with their last album in 2017 I named it my #1 album of the year. And though their debut album was a bit less focused than their 2017 release, that album too featured a couple of my favorite jazz tunes and overall songs of the decade. When I talked about them in my 2017 review, I was much less knowledgeable about jazz. In fact, Angles 9 have been an integral part of my developing interest in jazz, and it's partly because of them that I now consider avant-garde big band music one of my favorite genres. So to say I have a soft spot for them is an understatement.

Looking back at that 2017 review, I didn't really know what I was talking about (I remember I said something about it sounding like someone had slipped a bunch of LSD into the marching band's water cooler - still one of my best analogies). I just knew that I loved what I heard. Listening to this new record, and consuming lots of similar music from last century over the past couple years, I can say with confidence that these guys are much more that just my introduction into this style of music. They've quickly become one of my favorite modern bands and even with only three albums they're among my favorite jazz groups of all time.

So what makes them so great? It's pretty simple. See, a lot of people will tell you that the reason to listen to jazz is for the solos. That's what it's all about. Well, I love listening to a great saxophonist solo over some interesting chord changes. But something that attracts me to this particular sub-genre of jazz is that it's not only about the solos. The dynamic compositions, the melodic themes - forefathers of avant-garde big band like Charles Mingus put as much thought, if not more, into these structural elements as the soloists did. I've said for a long time that I think Mingus is my favorite jazz artist because he was a bassist, and therefore was never someone that wrote so that he'd have something cool to solo over. It was always about the composition first and foremost.

Angles 9 take this philosophy to the extreme. Sure, there are plenty of solos - this is jazz music. But the melodies that form the foundation of these songs are so damn strong. In fact, they don't really even feel like a foundation. The melodies are huge and upfront, and the improvised elements, while there's plenty of them, often serve more to color the melodies and add the crucial chaotic flavor. Seriously, some of the motifs on this album are in contention for my riff of the year, if only I decide that they qualify as a riff, I suppose. Plenty of rock and metal bands wish they could come up with riffs as powerful as the melodies Angles 9 base their songs around.

It's showcased more clearly than ever on the opening title track, which is a vigorously melodic song. But it's more than just the fact that this song is based around such a bold melody. Though the bassline is totally different from the main melody, together with the drums creates such a strong and salient forward propellant for the song, and is just as much a part of the theme as what the lead instruments are playing. And so it's not necessarily a sole melody in and of itself we're talking about but rather interaction and arrangement.

In fact, in a way the bassline stealthily emerges as the actual theme of the song as it progresses. Near the end, after the trumpet solo, the lead instruments convene on a different, yet just as bombastic melody as the main motif, while the bass and drums hold the original theme down. This allows the brass instruments to very fluently circle back around to the main motif. And then, at the very end of the song, the lead instruments actually all break into a version of the bassline, which although this is the first time everyone is playing in unison on the song, it feels so familiar because of how firmly a role that bassline has played in the first seven minutes of the song. Compared to some of their other stuff this song is relatively simple to break down and analyze structurally, but the very deliberate composition, coupled with such great melodic ideas, make it such an exciting listen.

The more discernible structure of the first song isn't really an indication of what's to come for the rest of the album. In fact, it's a bit misleading. The next two tracks are both over 12 minutes long and feature much more liberal structures, though there still is most definitely a method to the madness on these longer songs, in the sense that they still have very strong motifs that they are able to eventually circle back around to them. That path there just takes a lot of twists and turns.

While the album started off melodic and straight to the point, track three, Samar & the egyptian winter, starts off with over a minute of willfully caustic unaccompanied tenor saxophone soloing (much like the beginning of their previous album) that would make most uninitiated listeners rip their headphones off and yell 'what is this shit?', but makes me giddy with excitement to hear the rest of the track.

That onslaught of sax noise does such a great job setting that stage for the onset of this song's main motif, which again, is extremely powerful. Something about the almost vulgar psychology of opening a song that way is so compelling to me. It builds up tension in a way by saying, 'We're not gonna give you the song yet - we want you to be nice an uncomfortable and on-edge first'. And so when the piano, vibraphone, bass and drums drop in at the same time with that ominously lethargic theme you're already sucked deep into the grim world they've conceived. In that moment when it meets up with the rest of the instruments, I feel that the saxophone is personified into some sort of hellish beast.

The motif of this song really makes great use of the instruments at hand, in the way the piano and horns sort of call and respond to form the whole idea. It's a very evocative line and would make a great supervillian theme on its own. But with all the development this song goes through in it's 12-minute run time, it instead makes for a splendidly dynamic and downright infernal piece of jazz music.

But with the looser arrangement of this song compared to the first, comes one of the best moments of the album. Though the word 'moment' a bit of a stretch. What I'm referring to is the nearly 5-minute trumpet solo that starts around four minutes in. I generally don't make any effort to try and describe a solo, so you'll have to listen to it to know how amazing it is, but what I can talk about is how effectively the whole band is able to use the solo to build the song back up.

The song is stripped down at this point to just piano and trumpet - the trumpet outright soloing and the piano playing what might be some modal improvisation, or if not, then some loosely composed chordal textures (either way, beautiful playing). The upright bass player breaks out the bow and the other horns start to drone and trill in the background. As the trumpet gets noisier in ways that sort of callback the noisy saxophone intro, the rest of the band slowly becomes more melodic and organized. Finally, in the last minute of the solo, it starts to feel less like a solo, as the band dynamically overtakes the spotlight. Then just as the chaotic soloing of the trumpet is swallowed by the music, things retard into a slow trudge again and the saxophone becomes the soloist again for a short time, referencing the beginning of the song (this time with some modal bass plucking so as not to totally take the legs out from of the arrangement). Then like a foot-to-the-door the supervillian theme comes strutting back in.

Most of my favorite Angles 9 songs have more of an energetic climax to them; it's one of the things that makes them so great in my mind. But the dismal tread of this song as it moves from one section to another invokes a unique heaviness from it all, and makes the climax of this song very powerful in its own right, though it's apparent that they could have elongated the theme at the end and made it a bit louder. I like how they chose not to try and over-dramatize it at the end. It fits with the sluggishness of the rest of the song, and the whole build up is so strong that it's not necessary, and all things considered it's still a pretty fucking intense song.

These guys have followed an interesting trajectory over the course of their three studio albums released in the second half of this past decade. Their first album, features a few really dark and intense songs, which are really some of my favorite jazz songs ever. Their second album (the one that I named #1 of the year in 2017), was notably less dark, but because of how well executed they pulled of their mind-blowingly frantic and grandiose style on that record, and also because of how tightly arranged that 5-song album was, I saw it a big step forward. Deep down I was hoping for something as dark as the darkest moments on their first album but as concise of an album as their second, and lucky for me, that's essentially what I got with this one.

And as the album goes on, things just get darker and darker (except for the last track which is distinctly not dark in a way that gives the album a nice, celebratory sort of happy ending). The dark tone on this record is interesting however, because although it's dark, it's also rather elegant in a way that their previous releases haven't been. I mean, even though their last album was less dark, it was so wild and bombastic that I would never have thought to call it elegant. The reason this album sounds that way I think is because the piano is in a sense the nucleus of the music on this record. The brass instruments certainly stand out the most, and as I've mentioned the rhythm section is always actively giving the songs their momentum, but it seems like most of these songs originated on the piano. I have no idea if that's true but it's sure what it sounds like. And even though the songs feature a lot of darkness and dissonance, there's something about the pure tones of a piano that make that kind of harmonic tension oddly and uniquely graceful, and it's something that happens quite a bit on this album. 

Case in point - the fourth track, Against the permanent revolution, which starts off with an unapologetically dissonant piano motif. Yet, the song as a whole retains a sort of nefarious charm, like a malevolent antagonist in a story whose character you just can't help but like. Again, the contrast between the rhythm section and lead instruments in this one is just exemplary composition, as is the way that the melody of the lead instruments builds in piece by piece. The fiery fast saxophone solo is also a highlight. I really like how the sax solos on this album are typically done with tenor, as they all seem to have a lot of weight to them and are a bit more riffy than your typical sax solo.

I do wish they let the song build into something a bit more intense and loud, based on how it sets up that way in the beginning, but hey, this is their most mature release yet and they're showing that they can rely on the strength of their ideas and don't necessarily need to push every climax to the limit. And I think that for the album as a whole that light restraint serves to strengthen the elegance that I mentioned before.

And don't get me wrong - this album is intense and surely by common standards a totally unrestrained collection of music. In fact, most people would surely find this music to be objectionably anarchic and obnoxious. But by the standards of their two previous albums it's just a little bit less psychotic. Maybe for that reason, if this kind of music isn't your cup of tea, this is great album to dip your feet into the beautiful insanity of one of my absolute favorite bands to emerge in the past decade. And if avant-garde big band is your cup of tea, and you haven't heard Angles 9, what the hell are you doing reading this?

Two more big band albums from this year I want to shout out. Espoo Suite by Espoo Big Band features one of my favorite jazz songs of the year, the very grand and climactic opening track titled Quiet Flows the Aspen River. Also Polyhymnia by Yazz Ahmed for some mysterious sounding eastern influenced jazz.

5. Chelsea Wolfe - Birth of Violence

Chelsea Wolfe is among a few artists who, if I were to consider making some sort of list of my favorite artists of the decade, would immediately come to mind. Putting a new album of hers near the top of my end of the year list actually seems familiar and standard. She's on a four album streak right now of releasing one of my favorite albums of the year. But what really has distinguished Chelsea Wolfe among the great artists of this decade is how different each project she's put out has been. Most of my favorite artists of the decade accomplished that reverence from me by simple putting out consistently high quality material in their particularly appealing style. Wolfe approaches her art with a different kind of liberalness however. 2013's Pain is Beauty was a ethereal, electronic laden soundscape of emotion, like a dark incarnation of Radiohead or Björk. 2015's Abyss was a experimentally bleak and distant voyage into darkness, like a peak in a troubled songwriters deepest nightmares. 2017 Hiss Spun was deeply visceral and uncomfortable expression of suffering in the form of doomy and sludgy guitar-based heavy metal.

What's interesting about her last album of the decade, is that it is simultaneously the most significant departure from the loud and abrasive sound that she has developed over the past decade, but also in a way, the truest and most genuine expression of herself as an artist. I've always thought that one of the main things about Chelsea Wolfe that makes her such a great artist is her foundation in simple and stripped singer-songwriter music, and I've always felt that I've been able to hear that basis underlying her music no matter how blown up and messed with the final mixes of her songs are. Listening to this album is sort of like a rare opportunity to hear her songwriting closest to it's pure and unaltered form. For some artists that tend to create music with many layers of production, stripping everything away would make their music boring. But on this album, that stripped approach make her music feel more personal and emotive than ever.

She did release a collection of acoustic songs back in 2012 that I really enjoyed, but whereas that release felt sort of like a side project, this new album feels just as much of an artistic statement as her last few LP's. 

I want to talk about how amazing the songwriting is, but there is a lot to takeaway from the production, because what makes this truly a Chelsea Wolfe album is how carefully and creatively produced these contemporary folk songs are. I wasn't sure going in just how stripped this album was going to be. For all I knew, it was going to be an album of live acoustic guitar and single vocal track songs. While the acoustic nature of the songs makes them much different than most of the material on previous release, her use of atmospheric sounds, subtle synth layers, cavernous reverb, haunting delays, and things of this nature distinguish this collection of songs in a rather extreme way from any other singer-songwriter music I've heard this year.

If you listen to the title track, you'll notice that the acoustic guitar doesn't sound perfectly recorded and upfront, rather it sounds like it's coming from the other side of a large room. And underneath the beautiful vocal performance and guitar, you can hear a pulsating distant beat. It sounds to me like there a very prominent influence from film scoring on this album, especially horror films, in the use of obscure, atmospheric sounds. The song before, American Darkness, features some very peculiar and hard to place sounds swelling in and out underneath as well.  This time there's an acoustic drumkit - which is quite commonplace throughout the album and is consistently a great addition to these song because of how softly recorded and performed it is. As the song goes on some creatively panned and distorted vocal delays start to come in as well. Don't forget, amidst all this are fantastically written singer-songwriter songs that could stand alone without the production, or be ruined by overproduction, but thanks to Wolfe's very particular vision, are made to be as maximally engaging, dark, and ethereal as possible.

I do want to focus on the songwriting though. Something she does on quite often on this album that I absolutely love is she builds these slow songs up into rather powerful climaxes. She always manages to maintain the folky atmosphere of the album however, choosing mostly to build up her songs with Americana-esque vocal harmonies and more atmospheric production layers. The first track on the album, Mother Road, has one of the most intense climaxes, as it progresses from the driving gothic-country verses - again I love the light and softly mixed drumming on this song which in this case features a marching tom beat - the marching drum beat gets louder as the song reaches it climax, as a combination of symphonic swells and synths match the intensity of Wolfe's authoritative repeating line, "Bloom and eclipse them, wake up and transform". It's easy to forget that her last album was essentially a metal record, but intense parts like this I think somewhat reflect the diversity of her background and influences, as it is much darker and more forceful than you would expect from someone writing music that sounds like the first half of this song.

And even though this project sees her limiting herself to a tighter palette of sounds than ever before, in her commitment to it being an acoustic singer-songwriter album, it is important to recognize that this album does feature a lot of diversity and dynamics. The song Deranged for Rock & Roll, is definitely the outlier on the album, although it doesn't really feel out of place because it's still an acoustic based song and is produced with the same vision as everything else on the record. But it is quite a bit more upbeat. Although to be fair, for Chelsea Wolfe that just means not totally depressing and abysmal. It's more of a folk-rock song. But it's also one of my favorites as the somewhat catchy chorus sits in a really crushed out and mix with blown out drums and some very dirty and fuzzed out sporadic guitar leads at the end. I love how intentionally fucked up it is.

The track that follows, Be All Things, is the purest song on the record, in terms of it having only acoustic instrumentation for the most part, and really showcases Wolfe's ability to write an undeniably beautiful song. It's basically just a few layers of vocal and a string arrangement. But the vocal layers and melodies are stunning in this one. And as the string arrangement gets denser throughout the song it makes for a gorgeous melancholic climax. 

The softness of this song really allows you to focus on the lyrics too, as she conveys a seeming sort of metaphysical lament on mortality, singing "I cannot stop / I want to be all things / I've got to let go / I want to be all things". The simplicity of the lyric sounds like something someone would jot down during a rather existential troubling acid trip as the thought looped in their head.

To further point out the deceptive amount of diversity on this record, the very next song, Erde, is the most downright creepy, and in way most characteristic Chelsea Wolfe song on the album, as it builds into an eerie eastern-scale based repeating refrain of the lyrics "Erde, rip my heart out".

Not only have all of Chelsea Wolfe's past few albums been phenomenal, but every time she puts out an album there's at least one song on it that's right near the top of my favorite songs of the year. Heavy industrial bangers like Carrion Flowers in 2015 and Feral Love in 2013, would be in contention for a best songs of the decade from me. But because this album is so acoustic based, there's really no room for any songs like that, and so I went in to this one sort of content with the presumption that it was going to be a soft album and not expecting ant single songs on that level. Well I was right and wrong. There's no bangers per se. But I'll be damned if the final song, Highway, isn't one of the best songs she's ever written. It's the simplest song on the album. And it's very very simple; just a two-chord folk song. And those two chords are strummed with a basic pattern and no variation throughout the track. But it's possibly the best fucking two-chord song I've ever heard. Everything I've talked about so far is present in this song. There's all sorts of interesting production choice, cinematic noise, and background synths. I especially love how the mix starts to get blown out near the end. Again, the way she fucks with such a simple and beautiful song in that manner really gives it a ton of character.

But more so than the production, after who knows how many listens I'm still amazed how well she makes this two-chord song work. She goes through four distinct passages of vocals, so even though the guitar never changes, the song still feels like it progresses, and it does so in a linear way. She starts off the song immediately with some beautiful light, melodies on the line "Another city, another day", framing the wistful sort of setting for the song. Then she goes into a lower, more droney register in the next section, singing "Hours of the holy / We were so alone there / Just can't seem to get away / Shade our eyes to veil the pain", which feels like the song is getting darker, more serious and pointed. Something very important she does for the song once during both these part is ending on the word "highway", using a similar airy head voice melody with a sort of quasi-bluesy or country infliction, serving as a sort of hook within this somber song. And it sets up the ending of the song, where she simply just repeats that word. But it's all in the way she does it. The first three times, she sings it like the verses with that absolutely angelic higher register of hers, and especially on the last one she really emphasizes that infliction that she uses earlier in the song (again, like a hook). And then, in what feels like a transition into the last section (even though she's just singing the same word), she lowers her voice back into a more solemn state, but this time accompanied by some very dense harmonies, in what sounds like an apocalyptic country choir.

It's amazing how much time I can spend listening to long songs, with drastic harmonic changes, complex chords, impressive instrumentation, etc. And yet still, this to me is just the perfect song. Every production choice follows the vocal changes in such a deliberate and meticulously crafted way. And all the production elements and thematic nature of the lyrics and vocal melodies combine to make it so incredibly cinematic. It's one of those songs that needs to used in the ending credits to a movie. Hell, it's such an evocative song in that way it makes me want to write a TV show called 'Highway' just so this song could be used in the opening sequence.

Chelsea Wolfe's music has always scratched that cinematic itch for me. And the fact that that feeling runs through all her music no matter if its loud and heavy or soft and beautiful is a testament to how great of an artist she is. She can take her music anywhere, because no matter where she goes with, it will always have her creative mark. 

Chelsea Wolfe unique and compelling style has influenced a lot of artists since she started to breakthrough earlier this decade. That influence is quite apparent this year. I listened to an album called BLACK//LIGHT//WHITE//DARK, the debut by an artist named Evi Vine. She sounds almost suspiciously like Chelsea Wolfe (has anyone ever seen them in the same room?), but on this album she takes Wolfe's drone influences and amplifies them a little more while still being quite diverse overall. My favorite song is actually a slower, more lyrical, singer-songwritery piano-based track with lots of atmosphere called My Only Son, though if you're into Wolfe's previous work I recommend giving this album a listen.

4. Helium Horse Fly - Hollowed

Heavy music has a problem and is has for a while now. With all the progress that's been made in recording and guitar technology, it's now almost too easy to sound heavy. We've figured out how to get distorted sounds out of our guitars that Jimmy Page or Tony Iommi never could have imagined back in the 1970's. And since we can't get things more distorted, many guitarists have turned to extended range guitars to make things even heavier. But as guitarists switch from 6-strings to 7-strings to 8-strings, they running out of room to keep going lower before they're just playing bass. So how do we get heavier? And how to we capture the beautiful harshness that made this music so compelling when it started?

We go backwards. At least, in a way, that's what guitarist Stéphane Dupont from Helium Horse Fly is doing. 

What do I mean by that? Well, Dupont is tapping into something very interesting with his guitar playing on this record. It's dirty, noisy, abrasive - all the things that we want. But it sounds almost nothing like what modern metal guitarists are playing, so much so, that I'm not sure it even is metal. In fact, I've seen them referred to more often as noise rock. Although, there's really no one genre that can accuraetly descirbe their soind

To understand, we have to talk about what kind of guitarist Dupont is. And let me say first before I talk more about him, I don't want to give the impression that he's the star of Helium Horse Fly. They're a definitely more of a 'sum of their parts' band and don't write the kind of music where you're just waiting for the guitar solo. In fact, there are no guitar solos in the traditional sense. But there a reason why I want to focus on the guitar playing first, so let's do that.

It's quite difficult to figure out just from listening, and admittedly I was only able to ascertain this from watching a live video of the band, but Dupont is a bona fide classical guitar player. The perfectly relaxed right hand finger-picking technique gave it away at first, but when they zoomed in on his picking hand and I saw him plucking the strings with his distinctly long fingernails it was obvious. Once I figured this out and listened back it become quite obvious. There's a shorter instrumental track in the middle of the album called Progeny, which if it were rid of the guitars and bass, and played on acoustic instead of electric, would essentially be a classical guitar etude, as it's features very advanced and intricate right hand finger-picking technique almost exclusively. Although I'm glad they did it the way they did because with the gainy bass, the loud drums and the electric guitar it serves as a beautifully ominous and very unique break between the album's longer songs.

I'm sure there are plenty of metal guitarists with classical backgrounds, but I don't think I've ever seen someone so invested in the classical technique that they still pick with their fingernails on the electric. The only exception could be that I know the guys from Animals as Leaders incorporate some classical technique into their playing, but I'm not sure if they just use the flesh of their fingertips or not. It doesn't matter because Dupont incorporates it in a completely different way. Whereas Animals as Leaders combine a bunch of advanced techniques to create their uber-technical style of progressive metal, Dupont has a more focused approach. He uses his classical training to write very chordal music.

Now this is the important part. He's playing very chordally, and so normally what would happen if a metal guitarist tried to play with that much harmonic movement in their left hand it would just get muffled by the distortion and most of the nuance would get totally lost. Well, there's a obvious way to circumvent this problem but no one wants to do it; no one but Dupont - turn down the distortion.

This is what's genius about the way Dupont is composing his guitar parts on these songs. I suspect he's not using any distortion pedals at all. It seems like he's just using an amp with a bit of gain on it. 

So how does he make the music so heavy? It is pretty damn heavy after all. Well remember what I said about going backwards? He's getting the oldest kind of distortion - dissonance. I'm going to say something about something I'm completely ignorant about - but isn't distortion just a bunch of dissonant noise added on to your sound - just a bunch of random extra frequencies? Even if that's wrong, you get the idea. The chords and progressions he incorporates do not sound nice. They're very wicked sounding and very dark. I don't know if it's something he thinks about theoretically or if he just tries to sound as fucked up as possible but either way it works.

There's one other factor at play here, and this seems like a basic idea but it's really important - he strums, and he strums aggressively. Strumming a guitar hard with a little but of gain can make it sound very relatively distorted. And this is actually I think the coolest aspect of his playing, is that because he gets distortion from both his right handed and left handed technique, and not pedals, his playing is far, far more dynamic than your typical metal guitarist.

There's one particular point that I noticed this at - and I'm so infatuated with his guitar playing at this moment. It happens around four minutes in to the odyssey that is In a Deathless Spell, and this particular thing only happens twice. Amidst one of their crazy and heavy sections, he throws in these ridiculous melodic fills with really fast right and left-handed movement in between. But the things about these fills are that they sound totally clean, whereas all the guitar work around them sounds dirty and distorted.

I wondered at first if this was some sort of studio trickery, or if he was being extremely fast and precise with turning his pedals on and off. But now I realize he's just got this perfect balance of gain on guitar whereas when he goes from strumming chords to picking out notes, he has the liberty to do so with enough restraint that he can effectively bypass all of the distortion and get a close to perfectly clean guitar sound. You hear metal guitarists throwing fast runs in between their riffs all the time, but you never hear a clean run like this in the middle of a distorted part for the reasons I stated, and it's one of my favorite guitar moments of the year. The big picture aspect of this that I love is that well most modern metal guitar today severally lacks dynamics, and have their tones compressed to sound as full and powerful as possible at all times, Dupont has come up with some of the most dynamic guitar playing I've ever heard by dialing things back, and like a true acoustic guitar player, focusing on the dynamics of his hands.

Enough nerding-out over the guitar work though. This is a incredibly evocative and haunting album, and that's the reason that it's so high on my list.

I talked about the dynamics of the guitar, but it's really the combined dynamics of the whole band that makes these compositions so powerful. And as In a Deathless Spell is over 14-minutes, I can't only talk about the brief guitar runs in it that I like. If you wanna hear music that build's tension, listen to this song. It goes about four-minutes without any inkling of heaviness, wavering in between different levels of eerie melancholia, reaching a particularly soft moment as the vocalist quietly sings, "Do you fight fire with fire. Or just sit there and burn?". Then it explodes into the heavy section I mentioned before. This is the kind of songwriting tactic that they commit too. Every clean part just feels like the eye of the storm; waiting for the lightning to strike back in at any moment.

After this first heavy section, there's about two-minutes of isolated clean electric guitar playing. It's sort of a short composed classical piece transposed to electric, and teases the heavier riffs that are soon to follow. Again, the vocals come in soft and pause before the heaviness comes back. She does this quite often - taking the lead during the softer sections and stepping out once things get heavier. Their heavy sections are so convoluted, and since she does exclusively melodic vocals, it makes a lot of sense, and in a way creates an even stronger dynamic. In fact, the rhythm of this next heavy section feels very much like it's speeding up and slowing down, though there is a pulse, it's rather hard to follow. But when the beat does straighten out to some extent, she does bring her vocals in, this time with a chorus like effect, as the song fades into an oblivion of noise.

I'm doing a lot of just plain describing what's going on in the music here but there's good reason for that. Listening to this music is like observing some sort of new species. Between the uniquely dynamic and harmonically advanced guitar playing, the unorthodox rhythmic timing, and the droning jazzy vocals, this whole album is just otherworldly, but in more of a hellish than heavenly way.

Because of the harmonic qualities of the guitar playing I had originally suspected that these guys were heavily jazz influenced, and I'm not sure that I was too off in that presumption. The drummer undoubtedly comes from a jazz background, as you can tell particularly by the finesse he navigates the softer sections with and all those ghost notes he throws in. But his drumming everywhere is phenomenal. One of the best drumming performances in 2019. In the clean sections he's always able to come up with something subtly creative, and I don't need to explain how wild his drumming is in the heavier parts because listening will tell you all you need to know.

The vocals totally remind me of classic vocal jazz too. Just the context of how dark and twisted the music is make them sound very different than Ella Fitzgerald or whatever. But I hear it. I suppose too that the layer of improvised avant-garde saxophone solos in the middle of the first track Happiness is what probably made me think of jazz first. The saxophones only make a brief appearance, but I'll just throw this out there - if that was the norm on this album, like if they made a record where they made frequent use avant-garde brass instrumentation over these sections of fiendish chord changes, it would be the greatest thing ever. I would sell my soul to hear that album.

Nonetheless, even with just guitar, bass, drums and vocals, I can't help but get excited about how innovative this band's sound is, as they craft these lengthy, incredibly dynamic compositions with nuanced integration of classical, jazz, and I should mention too, what sounds to be a distinct influence from mathcore-type music like Dillinger Escape Plan in their use of rather difficult-to-wrap-your-head-around rhythmic patterns in their heaviest moments.

Seeing as I was just writing about them, I can't help but compare this album to the new TOOL record, though they are so different on a number of levels. But well I conceded a spot on my list for TOOL's new record, everything about it that wasn't satisfying - the lack of harmonic intricacy or variation, the relative lack of fulfilling climaxes - the presence of these things on this record is everything that I now love about Helium Horse Fly.

In their brand of dark and dynamic long for compositions, Helium Horse Fly give more harmonic complexity than I'm even capable of wrapping my head around. And the payoffs of the massive amounts of tension that they build through the dynamics in their songs are beyond satisfying. The whole last 6-minutes or so of the penultimate track, Monochrome, is like one monumental exercise in how to build suspense and bring home a piece of heavy music with unequivocal hair-raising closure (and the drummer sure gives Danny Carey a run for his money on this one too).

The ending riffs here are sublimely discordant and head-bang worthy. There's not much I can genuinely compare most of their riffing to, for reasons explained earlier, but the kind of dissonance the Dupont picks out in the riffs in the end of this song, combined with the frantic drumming, reminds me a little bit of Leviathan or Blood Mountain-era Mastodon, though not in a derivative way; more like it reminds me of a certain type of unconventional and eccentric heaviness that Mastodon has captured a few times. And those few times that they did it it was gold, but I really haven't heard a lot like it. But that sound is present in these riffs and I love that they close out the final song (besides the short acoustic and vocal outro track Shelter) this way.

I'm constantly surprised every year by a band with relatively low exposure. These guys were definitely it this year. The amount of people following them on social media is relatively low. I know a number of local bands with more followers than Helium Horse Fly. And to some extent it's not surprising, because nothing about what these guys are doing is accessible. I mean, even trying to explain that they're a really heavy and noisy band who turns the distortion way down is not an easy sell to most fans of that kind of music. And those who aren't are not gonna be interested in these 10+ minute creepy avant-garde noise rock/math metal songs.

But as far as I'm concerned, to anyone that asks me who I think is making the most progressive and ambitious heavy music now going into the next decade, Helium Horse Fly will be one of the first names that comes out of my mouth, thanks to this groundbreaking album. And if you're inclined to ask those sorts of questions, go give these guys a follow and listen to their albums, and show them that there are people who appreciate this kind extreme forward-thinking mentality in heavy music.

On the subject of avant-garde, forward-thinking heavy music, I need to mention the album CALIGULA by Lingua Ignota. This album totally threw me off because I had a really hard time enjoying it. There's something about the brutish honesty of the album's subject matter, which seems to be about some very serious abuse, that makes it hard to digest. It's one of the most emotional albums of the year, and though I tend to like dark and twisted music, there's something about this that honestly just makes me uncomfortable. I think maybe because these emotions are usually much more artistically veiled than they are on this LP. Does that make it worse or better? Depends who you ask. I'm not sure I'll ever return to this album, but I will listen to what she does in the future for sure. It bothers me a bit that I don't like it, but there's certainly something very compelling about this release that a lot of people have caught on to (it's been very highly rated by many music outlets so I don't feel too bad saying that I didn't enjoy it). If you think you can handle extremely dark and disturbing music, definitely give this one a shot, at the very least to find out if you can.

3. Michael Kiwanuka - KIWANUKA

When someone releases an album, that's not a debut album, with their name as the title, it nearly always mean on of two things. Either they've run out of creativity or they've finally made the album that they believe fulfills the vision they have for their art. I haven't seen enough of it to say but I'm guessing this law is amplified significantly when they put their name in all capitals. Well KIWANUKA is one my top 25 albums of the year list, so I'll let you guess which one it is.

This album was something I've been waiting a while for. See, when I made my first end of the year review in 2016, I discovered Michael Kiwanuka via his sophomore album, Love & Hate. It was a wonderful album of modern soul, and the big reason why I've been anticipating more from him, is how much the first track on that album resonated with me. I could barely believe how compelling the ten minute opener Cold Little Heart was, and I named  my #1 song of the year. Surely it's one of my favorite songs released this decade.

Immediately noticeable about this album, is that the production is not as polished as it was on his previous. Love & Hate was immaculately produced. Everything was crystal clear. It still sounded very old because of his style but the fidelity of those luscious recordings was obviously a product of a half century of progress in recording technology. It was different than his first album, which sounded great, but sounded genuinely like a lost album from the late 60's. The bigger difference was that the songwriting was much more varied, and pulled a little more from modern influences, which is what really sold me on it and compared to his debut.

Once someone polishes up their production and moves on from an earlier, rawer sound into something more modern and lavish, you don't expect them to go back. And it's not that I wanted Michael Kiwanuka to go back. This new album, his third, sounds again like something that I could've pulled from my 67 year old mom's vinyl collection, but the ways that his songwriting developed on the last album have continued to advance and diversify. I never would have complained if his new album had sounded like his masterfully produced 2016 album, but the sound he's gone for on this one is more of a choice this time - we know at this point that he could afford to have the lavish production most artists wish they could have - the way this one sounds is something of an artistic statement. in 2016 we got a great collection of songs with great production. In 2019 we've got a hypnotizing psychedelic journey into the past.

The way he incorporates distinctly old sounds into this new album is so nuanced, like he studied every soul release from 1965 to 1975, taking detailed notes along the way. There's so many instances where he incorporates sounds that made me think, 'I never would have expected that, but it sounds so perfect and in period'. The catchiest song and opening track, You Ain't the Problem, jumps straight into your head with a jovial, falsetto chorus theme of 'la la la's. Again, he's always sounded retro, but things like this don't just sound like they're from the 60's, they sound like they were a hit song you've heard from that era but don't know the name of. In a way, it just has the effect of sounding like a classic song. It has that distinct kind of enduring historic quality to it, even if it's a deception.

As an effect of this heightened evocation of this era, this album is even more soulful than any of his past releases. One of my favorite moments is on the song, I've Been Dazed, where a guest vocalist jumps into the song about halfway through to sing a gospel sounding call-and-response section that sounds straight of a black church in the 60's, singing "The Lord said to me /

Time is a healer / Love is the answer / I'm on my way". And I love how Kiwanuka then precedes to overlap his vocals over the top of this. You really feel like you're at a sermon. It's great because Kiwanuka was already leading the charge of modern soul in my mind and I'm sure many others, but rather than trying to appeal more to modern sensibilities he's delving even deeper into that timelessly compelling sound and creating an even more vividly retro scene.

One thing that stood out to me right from the start as well, that fits in with the vibe of this album, is the sound of the drums. They're so tight, in a really kind of low-fi way. There's no elements of that modern sort of punch that all drum recordings have nowadays. I can just imagine Kiwanuka in the studio saying, 'make them sound older' over and over again. It's obviously a very deliberate production choice. I wonder even if they we're recorded with some sort of limited mic setup. They're played with incredible finesse too, I will say, so credit to his drummer, though I can't seem to find his name anywhere online.

Even though there's no ten minute epic like the opener on his last album, what Kiwanuka does do is end his album with a incredible string of songwriting. Well I've talked a lot about the production choices and vision, my favorite things about this record is how powerfully he bring things to a conclusion.

It starts with track eleven, Final Days, which leads in with some very experimental percussive sounds, but turns into a beautiful piano ballad with fantastic melodies. Just from a technical standpoint, this song features what sounds to be like some rather interesting chord substitutions and a powerful major to minor modulation going from the verse the chorus. I don't recall him do anything with that level of chordal nuance in the past so it's pretty exciting to hear and sounds phenomenal within the context of his songwriting and style.

This song flows seamlessly into an interlude called Interlude (Loving the People). There's a lot of flow-enhancing interludes on this and on this one especially it does a fantastic job transitioning out of the previous song and an even better job bringing in the next song with a sort of decelerating pulsating synth.

God, I love the last two songs on the album. I can't get over how strong he ends this thing. It's not just because they're some of his best written tunes. It's because though the album starts off with more energy, and more of a psychedelic atmosphere to it, as it gets closer to the end things get much more organic and intimate.

This penultimate track, Solid Ground, let's Kiwanuka's preeminently soulful voice shine, by paring it exclusively with a soft electric keyboard. It's a stunningly emotional track, and the little falsetto he throws in before the hook is just heart-wrenching. The actual hook is very simple, just a repetition of the title, but it's another one of those simple genius moments, where he just digs into a lyrically compelling phrase and it ends up being much more emotional than your typical chorus. Sometimes that kind of simplicity gives a sense of fixated desperation and longing.

Amidst this palpable emotion, I do like how he throws in a little sort of willfully corny electric organ melody to reinforce the psychedelic sounds of the rest of the record. What I really love though is how they build up and bring the track home at the end. There's this subtle songwriting choice I really like too, that before they bring in all the percussion and orchestration, they sort of tease the hook with that falsetto note that I just mentioned, and then extent the pre-hook section, building a little extra tension before things open up into the extremely gratifying cinematic ending. I'm realizing now actually what makes that part so effective is that he briefly modulates into a different key with a brand new chord progression, just for this one section before returning the original key and progression that the rest of the song uses for the big outro. 

I'm so glad I do these reviews and put myself in a position to

realize stuff like this. It's no wonder I love the end of this album so much. He's doing interesting harmonic things in every song here. 

There's one song left, but I already knew about the modulation in this one. How could you miss it? Well maybe you were transfixed by the absolutely gorgeous string arrangement, or beautifully homey acoustic guitar picking progression - this song is quite the majestic soundscape. And I love the call-and-response falsetto choir in the chorus, recalling the topic of sublimely retro sounds that he has a habit of incorporating on the record.

But back to the important part, the key change, which rather than a song writing trick, is more like the crucial turning point in this song, as he sticks with the new key this time. It's such an emotional moment when he comes back in with his voice over the new progression, singing "I had to lose to understand / Strung out from all this / Pour out a thousand tears / I never knew a kinder man" and then repeating the line "Even if we are a mile apart" for the rest of the song. I don't wanna pry, but I wonder if he lost his father or some male figure close to him in the time between albums. The dramatic development of this song and those lyrics sure implies something of that nature.

With all the symphonic and the fill heavy drumming the ending actually kind of reminds me of some of early-King Crimson mellotron-heavy stuff. I need to stop mentioning King Crimson all the time.

But anyways, what a way to end the album with these last three songs; all beautifully arranged and designed to really highlight Kiwanuka's emotional rawness, but also, as I've learned taking a closer look at them, rather ambitious and liberally approached songs from a harmonic perspective as well, which is so promising looking forward at what we can anticipate from Kiwanuka in the future.

He's not just an incredibly compelling voice with a retro style. He's the real deal; an artist and songwriter that can push himself and make very bold artistic statements with his music, as he's done here. This wasn't the record I expected him to make, but for many reasons, it's the best kind of record he could make as an indication of how his artistry will develop over the next decade. He may have used up the KIWANUKA title, and maybe this was his magnum opus, but based on the progression of this album I don't think there's any reason to think that his future output won't be just as artistically dedicated and demanding, if not more. He's earned every bit of that faith.

There were a few very retro sounding records that caught my ear this year. Durand Jones & The Indications released a record called American Love Call that sounds like a soul album ripped straight out of the late 60's in a similar way to Michael Kiwanuka's first album. These guys have a really unique vocal dynamic though, featuring one singer with a great, soulful, raspy voice and a different singer who pretty much exclusively employs a Bee Gees-like falsetto, and they switch off taking the lead, which gives the album a really nice ebb & flow of variation. Hear how well they interact on the song Circles. And if you do listen to that song, you'll also notice that the drum grooves are tight as hell on this album.

This next album is very psychedelic but doesn't have any soul elements in it. It does sound very old for a completely different reason though. The album is South of Reality by The Claypool Lennon Dellerium, and it sounds old because John Lennon's son somehow sounds exactly like him. It's cool for that reason alone, but more so because Sean Lennon is joined by bass extraordinaire Les Claypool. On a song like, Blood And Rockets: Movement I, Saga Of Jack Parsons - Movement II, Too The Moon, we get an totally Abbey Road-esque psychedelic rock track, with phenomenal bass playing, and an epic I Want You (She's so Heavy)-esque coda section. Sean Lennon also proves to be really good guitar player at the end of this one with an awesome solo. Who knew?

2. Thank You Scientist - Terraformer

I'm a big quality over quantity guy, so a lot of the times when bands say they're putting out a double album, I'm a bit skeptical. I love a good 30-40 min record; something you can put on confident that you're gonna be able to stay engaged through the whole experience. But there are a few bands who earn a bit more faith from me, and after blowing my mind and putting out one of my favorite rock albums of all-time in 2016, I had no reservations when I heard that the new Thank You Scientist album was going to be 80+ minutes long.

They've earned a 'fuck it, give me everything you've got' mentality, which isn't something that I feel about many bands, but it's a great feeling having that much trust in a group's creativity. An even better feeling though, is when you actually listen to their new album and realize that everything you love about their sound and their songwriting is present and just as strong as before, and they've made some noticeable advances in their sound.

Their general writing is still progressing. For one thing, I think a lot of the choruses on this album are the best they've come up with. Partly because of great vocal performances, but also to my ear it sounds like they're making an effort to sort of imply more colorful and complex chord progressions into their choruses, which is a pretty unique sound considering their sort of loose basis in the post-hardcore genre, and sets the stage for a lot of interesting vocal melodies. I think it's partly cuz of how many instruments that they have going, and so the guitar and bass are able to play power chords and they use the other instruments to expand things harmonically - but I'm not sure if that's exactly what's going on and it would take a lot of effort to figure it out. Anyways the vocal melodies in the chorus on Son of a Serpent, over the lines, "But I'm sure there's a place to bury the old me and start anew / Tired of the things I put me through / How much can I lose?", really resonate with me in a specific way that would be hard to accomplish with your basic sort of punk power-chord progression and vocal melody.

In a similar vein, I have to mention that the guitar playing by Tom Monda is unreal, and his solos are maybe the best he's ever done, but as the same time he's always been an absolute beast of a player so who knows? All I know is that the way he solos over the changes in Everyday Ghosts is so beyond what pretty much anyone else is doing in this kind of music right now, and I need to know how long it takes him to write a solo like that, because if it's anything less than a full 40-hour work week I might quit playing guitar (the way he briefly throws in that dissonant chord near the end of the solo.. oh my god). 

This record is definitely their most cohesive and thematic release yet. It's not really a concept album I don't think, but it's certainly conceptual, with a lot of space theme's tying in with the album title, like in FXMLDR, which features a very catchy chorus, "Looks like you finally made it / How I've anticipated / Your return to planet Earth". The whole song is tied together really nicely with commitment to this very distinct lyrical theme, more so than any of their previous stuff that comes to mind. It feels a little weird starting by talking about lyrics with Thank You Scientist, cuz they're music is so amazing the lyrics could be complete nonsense and I wouldn't care. But this theme especially fits fantastically with their sometimes inhumanely tight and well-composed music and really puts you in a setting. In fact, you really gotta give props to vocalist Salvatore Marrano on this song; from the evocative lyrics, to the catchiness of his vocal melodies, and finally that mighty, long final belt of "take me home" at the end of the song.

Of course, it's always a team effort with these guys. What makes the belt one of the best moments of the year is how the rest of the band builds up, stops, and then slams back in with a heavy avant-garde jazz fusion section featuring screaming horns and a powerful theramin part (love how they use theramin on some big parts on this album - they've used it before but they way they've incorporated it this time feels way more sublime and fitting to the theme of the album). Every so often Thank You Scientist compose a section that is just shockingly well-executed. This is one of those parts. They've got so many options available to them with all the instruments and their individual talent on each one, when they do a long song like this and reach that climax there's really no telling how good it can be.

On that topic, the songs on this album are longer than ever. They're really pushing forward into progressive rock songwriting and focusing on making long, epic songs, and for the reason I just mentioned, I'm so on board with that direction. I can't talk about huge endings without skipping ahead to the ninth track, Life of Vermin. This track is interesting because it isn't as chorus based as most of their songs. In a way it sort of has a chorus in the first half of the song, and completely different one in the second half. But what I mean to say is that the song doesn't circulate around and return to one particular hook. They really let this one flow out and change direction, as it has the funkiest beginning of any song and the heaviest ending. I mean the last few minutes of this are just head-spinningly intense: from the moment they break it down into a swing jazz acoustic section, and the use a trumpet solo to build things back into heaviness (they always use their solos to such great effect to change and build up the song from underneath instrumentally), then into a build up lead by a passionate vocal performance, singing "Crazy, why deny the spirit still left inside? / The beast that we try to hide / Crazy, but why surrender battles I have won? These battles I have won", and finally a heavy as fuck metal-meets-big band head-banging section. It's just as amazing as it sounds. And right at the end, they throw in the little harmonic minor motif from way back in the beginning of the song, making you realize what that big ending riff was based on if you weren't perceptive enough to remember, and how musically connected that whole epic song actually was.

That kind of thematic connection to me is what really separates bands that write unnecessarily long songs and bands the write powerfully long and epic compositions. Even though the songs are more consistently long on this album, nothing feels unnecessary. Anchor is the second longest song on the album by less than ten-seconds, but I think it's their most well-composed song to date. It's interesting, because within this ten-minute saga of a song, there's relatively little overtly prog/insane instrumental moments.

Now, generally I'm not a fan of that kind of stuff anyways, relative to good songwriting and melodies, etc. But Thank You Scientist do it so well. They always have a good melodic and rhythmic basis to their songs, and what they'll do is just utilize their incredibly high level of musicianship to mess with and deconstruct things in ways that always put a smile on my face (listen to the way they get back into the verse after the first chorus in Swarm, with some totally ridiculous chromatic shenanigans).

But in a way that's what makes Anchor so cool, is that they finally reach their sort of ballady epic, it's like they exercise some discretion and say, 'okay, this one's gonna be serious' and the result is quite dramatic. It starts with a really evocative call and response between a highly-delayed clean guitar and plucked violin, creating a chord progression that serves as a great theme for the song. And sets the stage for what is definitely the most cinematic song Thank You Scientist have ever recorded. It builds up with some epic tom percussion, almost like a classic Tool song, but with way more melodic layers and harmonic complexity. The string playing/arrangement throughout this song adds so much to the movie-like atmosphere. It has a sort of mid-20th century orchestral film music feel to it.

I should mention too, part of what makes this work so well is that this record is engineered and mixed much better than their previous two records, and who's ever responsible for putting together the sounds of this 7-piece band's double album deserves a goddamn metal, because it sounds amazing. It's a big deal because I finally feel like they've got a production that is worthy of their sound. They take a little more liberty (a lot in this song) to do more layering and harmony with their non-traditional rock instruments, as opposed to previous albums where I feel they wanted to only record what they felt they could reproduce exactly live (maybe also they wanted to limit the number of tracks for mixing sake). They have such a huge and tight sound live anyways, that working to get this more cinematic sound in the studio recordings is something I'm all on board with, especially in instances like right before the violin solo (which is a fucking awesome solo by the way), where they use several violin layers to build up and explode into the solo.

This song sort of gives me mixed feelings about how I want Thank You Scientist's sound to move forward, because this song is so expressive and passionate, I'd love for them to focus more in this direction. But at the same time some of their more Zappa influenced craziness and humor is so fun. It says a lot that I can't even decide what direction I want them to go in because no matter what I know it'll be amazing.

While I'm mostly floored by the music on this album, the one thing it's kind of missing compared to the last album is a song like Mr. Invisible, which was the expressly fun and danceable song on their 2016 masterpiece album Stanger Heads Prevail. There's a lot of moments like that on the album but pretty much every song builds up into something much more intense. I guess I want them to do songs that are more explicitly dramatic the whole way through, like Anchor, and more explicitly fun songs like Mr. Invisible. I like it when the songs are a bit more distinguished in that way. Although as I said when talking about Life of Vermin, I really like when the song takes you on an unpredictable journey as well. See, Thank You Scientist are so good that even when I reach to try and be critical it doesn't end up making any sense.

It's a really tight call not naming this my album of the year. I mean, there are several of my favorite songs of the year on this thing. I like the closing title track (out of this world fretless guitar playing on this one/love the really distinct chicken pickin' guitar theme), but it's probably my least favorite on the album, which is actually a big problem when thinking about your favorite album of the year because on an 80+ minute album you have to really look forward to the ending. If they'd have just ended with Anchor it would've been my #1 no question. It's the only song I feel that they could have cut it down a bit; it might've been better as the shorter/catchy song on the album. And it ends a little anticlimactically (but really only cuz they spoiled me by sticking massively climactic endings at the end of pretty much every other song). It's still fucking great song; they just set the bar so high.

But hey, it doesn't really matter what my #1 is. This is still some of the most incredible rock music ever created, and going into 2020, no one can touch Thank You Scientist in my opinion. It sounds like an over-dramatization, but for me, these guys are the future of music. This combination of boundlessly diverse influences, thoughtfully expansive composition, and high level musicianship is what I want to hear going into the next decade. At least I know I'm going to get it from one band. Single album, double album, triple album - give me whatever you got, Thank You Scientist.

1. Maurice Louca - Elephantine

This isn't like any of the other #1 albums of the year that I've selected since I started doing this in 2016. This year, something different happened. Well there was a lot of albums that I really loved, none of them felt like they were just so perfectly organized and constructed that they were worthy of the #1 spot. There were a lot of albums that had a lot of great songs that I wanted to listen to, but there wasn't that one album that I wanted to just hit play from the beginning and get lost in - at least, not so much that it was an album of the year. A lot of my favorite albums had a song or two that I wasn't that into, or were just generally a bit longer than I felt that they needed to be.

The album is, maybe unfortunately, becoming less relevant, as streaming has made the practical application of the album format somewhat unnecessary, and artists have less incentive to care about flow and construction in the traditional sense. But as long as it's still relevant to me, and I'm picking my album of the year, then it's albums like this that I'm going to pick.

The reason that the flow of an album is so important, isn't just to appease music snobs like me. What I've always found to be important about constructing an LP with consideration for how each track develops the narrative of the record and leads into the next, is that the more attention that you give to that, the more diverse the music on your record can be.

I find that generally, there's two things that keep albums from being great or worthy of album of the year level status. On the one hand, many albums stick to a specific style and sound, and no matter how great it is, some tracks can seem a bit redundant because they aren't as good as songs on the same album that are similar. On the other hand, some albums do feature a very diverse range of music, but they don't make for a very fulfilling listen all together because it just seems like a collection of unconnected ideas. Either way, you're not motivated to listen to the album as a whole, even if the individual content on it is great.

To explain how this album eludes both of those common album deficiencies, I'm actually going to start at the end. The last song on this record, Al Khawaga, is one of my favorite pieces of music to come out this year, and one of the best jazz compositions of the decade. The massively explosive and clunky main theme of this song, which cycles in a sort of 7/4, 6/4, 6/4, 5/4 time feel, and features this really unique sort of call-and-response between the more typical big band instruments and the oud (eastern plucked string instrument) and I think acoustic guitar as well, opens up the song with a bang.

The rest of the track is composed with the intention of building back up to this theme, something they do twice more. And damn, every time they bring that theme back in they do it with such meteoric impact, partly because of how well they're able to build up tension in the preceding sections, and partly because of how perfectly they pull off the transition. The saxophone players really deserve a lot of the credit, taking solos during the 'in-between' sections, and each time noisely leading back into the main theme. The second build up into the final reprise of the theme features some excellent frantic drumming, before slowing things down into a rhythm-less section under another saxophone solo. The drums then start to build up and we get a brief duel saxophone solo before, holy fuck, the sky comes crashing down this time as they bring the main theme in again and both saxophones continue to solo over it in gloriously obnoxious avant-garde fashion.

Too often I hear a song with a great theme or riff, where the band doesn't bring it back at the end, or at least not with a satisfying amount of intensity, and it feels a bit wasted. Listening to the end of this song is one of those moments where I just think, 'thank you' to the band, 'that's exactly what I wanted!' Except with the way they crank up the discordant avant-garde improv elements at the end, it's even more than what I could've wanted or imagined. And even after all that, the way they savagely repeat the main theme, stripped of the call-and-response elements and totally unified with long stretches of dramatic space in between is one of the heaviest moments of the year in all kinds of music, and one of the most memorable conclusions to a jazz record that I can think of. 

So why did I start the review talking about the last song? While it's important to recognize, that based on how gratifyingly climactic and Al Khawaga is, the power of that finale creates a great sense of anticipation throughout the album for me, in the same way that a movie or TV show builds suspense with some impending and inevitable confrontation. Yes, you could say this about any album with a great last song. But few albums are able to 'put me in a place' the way that this one does, and so as soon as I start that first track, I'm already thinking in the back of my mind about the gargantuan ending of Al Khawaga in the same way I think about the ending of any long, epic song when it begins. It just takes thirty minutes to get there instead of fifteen.

And to that point, there's jazz compositions like the legendary 1969 Pharoah Sanders piece, The Creator Has a Master Plan, which falls only a few minutes shorter than this whole album (32 minutes vs 38 minutes), so it's not that unprecedented in jazz. Even though it's not a single composition, the album itself is composed in enough of a unified manner that they accomplish some of that same cohesion and anticipation. Yet, you also get the benefits of each track feeling independent and evocative in it's own way.

Instrumentation is a key factor in giving this album it's cohesive feel. The first track, The Leper, starts the record of with acoustic guitar, and so it's not even obvious to the listener that this is even going to be a jazz album until at least the first minute in. This track serves as sort of the theme for the album, carrying a consistent driving groove, setting a mystical atmosphere with meditation bowls and vibraphone, and slowly introducing the jazz elements. The avant-garde saxophone soloing comes in very gradually as the groove continues, and so it's not a sudden descent into chaos, but it establishes that as a part of their sound and sets up the rest of the record. It's a laid-back, cruise down the highway kind of jazz tune, but also a bit dark and a bit crazy, like you're driving down the highway in a post-apocalyptic world and you're whizzing by the flaming wreckage of World War III.

It's a really interesting mix: jazz and eastern music. One of them sounds so modern and metropolitan, the other so ancient and primordial. Of course, this is far from the first jazz album to incorporate those sounds together, but it is one of the most consistently eastern sounding jazz LP's I've come across, and considering that this record comes directly from Egypt, it should be no surprise how genuine the application of that unmistakable harmonic language is.

When I talk about this album being cohesive, a huge part of it is this amalgamation of styles. It's such a distinct and compelling pairing, and I think that it is the major contributing factor to what makes this album feel so connected despite the diversity of each song, because anytime your hear that pairing you're going to think, 'wow, those styles sound so cool together', but there's a million ways to pair them because they're such distinctly colorful and expressive styles of music. I've thought for a long time that these styles go together amazingly so in a way it's not surprising that when I find an album that combines them this consistently it ends up being my favorite album of the year. 

After slowly bringing in the saxophones in the first song, they let the other instruments die out and precede very fluently into the short, floating, melodic yet still quite avant-garde saxophone-centric piece that is Laika. This one's interesting because although it's jazzier in the sense that it's based around the saxophones, it sounds very eastern; almost like an archaic Egyptian dancing song, perverted by excursions of avant-garde improv.

While the final song is the peak of the album, track three, One More for the Gutter (love the title), serves as an important spike of intensity in the middle of the album, and is by far it's most unhinged moment, as they foray into absurd degrees of cacophonous improvisation and free jazz; we're getting close to Coltrane's Ascension levels on this one. But what I absolutely love about this track, is that while the brass instruments are going nuts in ways that I can't explain, other than it sounding awesome, there's a consistent and very heavy, crashing interjection by the acoustic guitar and drums. So well there's not really a groove to this song, this unique dynamic between the instruments has the effect of making this chaos of it all much more evocative and grounded. Not grounded in the sense that it's not as crazy, but that the craziness has some sort of specific feeling and purpose to it. It feels like you're running through a warzone or a meteor shower with explosions happening all around you, and the brass instruments are the sound of the fires burning in their wake.

At this point, the album is already shaping up to be quite a diverse collection of jazz. But after the craziness of track three, they take things in an even more unpredictable direction. The Palm of a Ghost is not really in any way a jazz song. It's more of a eastern folk song, consisting of acoustic guitar, oud, violin and tabla (or some eastern hand drum). And it has a lead vocal part (sung in Arabic I'm assuming). It's a haunting track that would feel vastly out of place on any other jazz album aside from some of the vaguely avant-garde string playing. But up to this point they've established their eastern foundations, and with the acoustic guitar on the previous track, it feels like they've really pulled you into that area of the world, and now you've gone too deep to turn back.

Fittingly, the acoustic guitar of that track leads very deliberately into the return of their jazz sound on the penultimate title track. This song is the one I would be least likely to listen to out of the context of the album. Yet based on the high variation of the previous two tracks, it serves an essential purpose, gradually bringing back the sound that they established on track one, but with a much looser and rhythmically-free atmosphere. They've sort of twisted your expectations around and situated you in their Egyptian jazz dream world, and now they solidify the daze that they've set you in. The vibraphone playing on here is key. This track is very peaceful and ambient, but it has a simultaneously ominous and uncomfortable sort of undertone to it. It kind of seems like, and it could be that, this song is a totally free improvisation. You can hear that degree of looseness in it. A whole album of that looseness would make for a much less interesting experience, but positioned here at the second to last track, after the one-two-punch of heavy avant-garde madness and haunting eastern folk song that were tracks four and five, and preceding the enormous finale, I really like how this one functions.

One of the reasons I like writing these end of the year reviews is because it helps me think about what makes a great album and enhances my appreciation of music. I write most of my thoughts on the albums before I settle on a final order, and so as I'm writing I sort of realize what my favorite albums of the year really were. I think that makes sense because comparing music to other music, especially things from completely different genres and with completely different moods and intentions, is always gonna be a bit of an exercise in futility. It's so arbitrary.

I had something significant to say about every track on this album. And it wasn't just, 'this track is great', 'that track is great'. For every song, I was inspired to write about the track's individual role on the album and how in contributed the record's vision. I usually won't even talk about every song in these reviews because I can't do it without sounding redundant. But it was no problem with this one.

If there's a takeaway for me from naming this album my #1 in 2019, it's that the art of the album is far more powerful than I often give it credit for. I mean, I'm here doing a top 25 albums list for the fourth year in a row, so I still am clearly quite moved by the album format. But even someone like me spends a lot of time just shuffling playlists and streaming individual songs out of context. And that's fine. You don't have to listen to albums to love music. But the experience of a great album is a one-of-a-kind experience, and when someone pulls it off, it really connects you with the music on a deeper level.

Picking an album of the year isn't about comparing which songs on each album you liked better or giving each album a one out of ten rating. It's about recognizing which album, when you see the cover art or when you hear the first few seconds of the first song, makes you want to listen to the whole thing right through to the end. Which album makes you want to immerse yourself in that world and go on that familiar journey? In 2019 it was Maurice Louca's Elephantine.

Top 25 of Albums of 2019 (Recap):

25. Leprous - Pitfalls

24. Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky - Droneflower

23. Sâver - They Came with Sunlight

22. Billie Eilish - WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?

21. PoiL - Sus

20. Brian Krock - liddle

19. Opeth - In Cauda Venenum

18. black midi - Schlagenheim

17. Liturgy - H.A.Q.Q.

16. Moon Tooth - Crux

15. Ithaca - The Language of Injury

14. Pjin & Conjurer - Curse These Metal Hands

13. Patrick Watson - Wave

12. TOOL - Fear Inoculum

11. Brutus - Nest

10. Fire! Orchestra - Arrival

9. Maggie Rogers - Heard it in a Past Life

8. Bent Knee - You Know What They Mean

7. Ioanna Gika - Thalassa

6. Angles 9 - Beyond Us

5. Chelsea Wolfe - Birth of Violence

4. Helium Horse Fly - Hollowed

3. Michael Kiwanuka - KIWANUKA

2. Thank You Scientist - Terraformer

1. Maurice Louca - Elephantine

Top 25 Songs of 2019 (Spotify Playlist):

*No repeat artists for sake of diversity

25. Estranged - Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky 

24. I, Vanish - Sâver
23. Marvelous Houses - Jakals
22. Twist - Thom Yorke
21. Ride on my Bike - Rosalie Cunningham
20. Invincible - TOOL
19. 953 - black midi
18. Roseate - Ioanna Gika
17. Through Ash - Moon Tooth
16. The Wave - Patrick Watson
15. Sun Ra - Jamila Woods
14. Samar & the Egyptian Winter - Angles 9
13. Monochrome - Helium Horse Fly
12. Retrograde - Maggie Rogers
11. Terrible Lizard - The Aristrocrats
10. Bone Rage - Bent Knee
9. Blue Crystal Fire - Fire! Orchestra

8. bury a friend - Billie Eilish

7. Al Khawaga - Maurice Louca

6. The Sky is Red - Leprous

5. Solid Ground - Michael Kiwanuka

4. Control - Ashley Zarah
3. Saturnine - Brian Krock

2. Life of Vermin - Thank You Scientist

1. Highway - Chelsea Wolfe

2019 All-Star Band: (i.e. My Favorite Individual Performances)

*Vocals/Guitar/Bass/Drums/and one other instrumentalist of my choice

Vocals: Courtney Swain (Bent Knee/Courtney Swain)

Guitar: Stéphane Dupont (Helium Horse Fly)

Bass: Boris Cassone (PoiL)

Drums: Danny Carey (TOOL)

Saxophone/Clarinet: Brian Krock (Brian Krock)

Riff/Motif of the Year: Beyond Us - Angles 9 (stars at 2:00)

Solo of the Year: Everyday Ghosts - Thank You Scientist (guitar solo at 6:45)

Chorus/Hook of the Year: Retrograde - Maggie Rogers

Best Lyrical Song: Drifting - Ioanna Gika

Best Album Art: Leprous - Pitfalls

*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: Chelsea Wolfe - Birth of Violence

Wrap-Up:

Well there's a couple trends that persisted this year. New jazz music continues to excite me. That's two out of the last three years that a jazz album has been my #1 of the year. This year, not only did Maurice Louca secure my #1 ranking with his eastern avant-garde jazz odyssey, but three out of my top ten albums were jazz albums.

It's hard to say, because I wasn't listening to music with the same sort of dorky ambition that I am now, but I'm not sure there were any other years in the past decade or two that my #1 album would've been a jazz record, so unless it's just that my tastes are changing, there's good reason to look forward to what jazz music will become in the 2020's. 

The other genre that's make huge progress in my eyes: pop - the genre that I basically rejected on principle back when I started doing this in 2016. After Rosalía grabbed my #1 album last year, it shouldn't be a surprise. But with her gaining more and more mainstream traction, and the somewhat unprecedented rise of Billie Eilish, as well as the mounting popularity of Maggie Rogers, this year has left me with a drastically increased amount of hope for mainstream music tastes.

Not that I have that much interest or confidence in what your average person listens to nowadays, there's still a lot of shit, but I'm realizing that it's just not as dire as I thought it was. There's reason to believe that true creativity and artistic vision can be rewarded, even if things are still far from where I'd like them to be, and certain types of innovation will always be overlooked.

But even in pop, there's stuff going on underneath and unbeknownst to the mainstream, as I listen to artists like Ioanna Gika and Ashley Zarah there's a hope, an expectation even, that pop music will become much more decentralized in the next decade, and that will encourage more creativity and experimentation than ever.

For rock and metal music, this year indicated to me that the future will be defined either by newer bands or bands the evolve. Most of my favorite records were by those bands who've only put out a few LP's before. Thank You Scientist's album was their third, Brutus, Moon Tooth and Helium Horse Fly their second, Ithaca and black midi their first. For Bent Knee it was the fifth, but only because they're so prolific - they're as old as most of these other bands. There were a few older bands on the list, but those were not the records that excited me the most. And more so, I found that many of the albums that didn't make the list this year were by longer-running bands who didn't really push the envelope or do anything better than their best stuff.

Chelsea Wolfe was the artist that most successfully pursued a distinguished change in her sound this year, something that shouldn't be surprising based on her history. It did feel totally right ranking her so highly though, and of course putting her unbelievably captivating two-chord song, Highway, as my favorite song of the year, based on the penchant for change and experimentation she's demonstrated this decade. I'm really glad it worked out that way. She's as good an artist as any to exemplify what it meant to be an artist in the 2010's and what it should mean to be an artist in the 2020's.

But there I go again, talking about decades. It doesn't really matter, does it? It's just another year, and every year I'm blown away by fresh, innovative music. That's what I've found doing these reviews, is that we're living in a time where if you really want to find something compelling, there's artists both popular and unknown doing it all over the world in so many different ways. As it becomes easier and less expensive to record music, and as genres continue to advance and blur together in new ways, there's no reason not to expect the 2020's to push music forward more than ever.

I'm thinking of doing some sort of end of the decade review and list similar to this in the next couple weeks so follow this blog on social media (instagram/facebook) or bookmark it, or whatever and maybe you'll be here again in a few weeks.

Anyhow, happy new year and happy new decade!