Juvenile Nonfiction
24 Best Albums in 2024 (Incorporating 2023 because I effed off last year)
24/11/12: Life fell apart late last year, and I missed my year-end best of tradition. Now my personal situation has settled somewhat and it's the rest of the world that's burning. I think in light of [vague handwave at everything] we need a good end-of-year list more than ever. These are mine; ymmv. Honorable mentions in the source HTML. Remember, don't comply in advance, kids!
2024 Best
- Kelly Lee Owens - Dreamstate
Kelly chants "Dream" like a hypnotist who knows you know you're a sucker.
- Clement Bazin - Believe In Spring
Steel drum is the heart of a viiiiibe.
- Patrick Holland - Infra
Unserious synth/dance music for overly sincere people.
- Trace Mountains - Into The Burning Blue
I just want to grab Dave Benton and tell him it's going to be okay. Like a less-self-serious Adam Granduciel, and I mean that in the best way.
- Waxahatchee - Tigers Blood
I hear the title track and half an hour later I'm emerging from a summer reverie and all the ice has melted in my glass.
- Lucy Rose - This Ain't The Way You Go Out
Classical music.
- Caribou - Honey
Dan Snaith does a 180 from Our Love and makes a breakup album for sweating out your pain on the dance floor. The multiple people you are inside when you're processing grief? That's Dan's voice processed through AI into a different person on every track.
- Floating Points - Cascade
Anyone who can pivot from this to this has my eternal allegiance.
- Iron & Wine - Light Verse
Not sure whether or not the lead single, an impressionistic divorce duet w/ Fiona Apple, had anything to do with it, but this one just keeps coming back to the surface this year. It's a step up from Beast Epic, more exploratory, more rewarding. Something wants to eat us all alive.
- Hurray For The Riff Raff - The Past Is Still Alive
I never thought I'd get a second shot at the feeling of hearing Car Wheels On A Gravel Road for the first time.
- Jamie xx - In Waves
Light years more accomplished than his last long player, In Colour. All of his instincts are flawless, laser focused on the dance floor. You don't even see it coming and then wham it hits where you least expect it from a direction you hadn't even clocked. "What. the. fuck."
- Bonny Light Horseman - Keep Me On Your Mind/See You Free
Bonny Light Horseman is a supergroup trio comprising Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats, Josh Kaufman (sideman extraordinaire and co-producer of the almost embarrassingly star-studded Day Of The Dead tribute), and Anaïs Mitchell (composer of the Tony-award winning musical Hadestown). Their 2020 debut, Bonny Light Horseman, opens with the lines "Oh Napoleon Bonaparte / you're the cause of my woe" on the track Bonny Light Horseman, and this titular recursion is a perfect sign of the band's brilliant idea: that the music of the past is inherent in the music of the present, that we descend many layers deep into our history every time we engage with the now sound. Making that idea explicit by treating anglo folk music as if it were contemporary indie songwriting resulted in one for the ages, my favorite album of 2020 and an acknowledgment that even the distant past is still very much alive in our pop tradition.
Their follow-up, 2022's Rolling Golden Holy, tried to reprise the alchemy with original compositions, and in hindsight it's understandable that it fails to reach the same heights. The first album illuminated that "old/new" dichotomy by employing new arrangements of old songs; it's wasn't apparent how they'd carry that magic over into new arrangements of new songs, and their attempt made for a transitional but not transcendant record. How do you write a song that evokes the past, is rooted in the present, but escapes the gravity of both?
They've solved that riddle with this year's double masterpiece. Their two-part solution? Record the whole thing in an ancient Irish pub with its cast of regulars in attendance, harnessing "the analogs between this century-old meeting place of local folk and this trio of American folkies.*" And write almost exclusively from a place of reckoning, remorse, resignation and regret, themes that both haunted and animated the folk songs they covered for their debut.
The result is this year's best album. Sprawling, soaring, heartbreaking, life-affirming, KMOYM/SYF manages to capture something timeless— these songs feel like you've known them forever, like they already existed and you're just hearing versions of them in the delicious harmony of Johnson/Mitchell/Kaufman's voices. Johnson and Mitchell's songwriting modes are complementary to each other and the project, both excelling at observational image poetry and at evoking pathos in their melodies. They bring the full weight of those skills to these two records, the first of which opens looking in the rearview mirror ("Part of me... aches for you and always will / Keep me on your mind"), while the second ends with a wish for the future ("I just want to see you free / Do you want to see me free?"). They mourn and marvel at the passing of time, expressing bitterness and gratitude almost in the same breath ("Hold on, my love, it's all coming undone / Tears fall, my love, tumbling down"). There's an obvious resonance with reckless doubles of the past - Exile On Main Street comes to mind, as does Physical Graffiti - and with the generalized grief of the American moment.
But no one is doing today exactly what Bonny Light Horseman is doing here. With one foot squarely in the tradition that made their debut so fertile, and the other kicking towards a future just beyond the horizon, they've managed here to span many lifetimes of human experience and the specificity of a single image at the same time. The tension in the titles (can we really be completely free and also tied to memory?) is the central tension of BLH, and they've mined it here for something good as gold. I don't expect to tire of listening anytime soon.
2023 Best
- Overmono - Good Lies
Scratches the same itch as The Range, and the title track is an absolute banger. Headphone gold.
- Emily King - Special Occasion
God she's smooth.
- Will Butler + Sister Squares
Turns out there's life after Win and it's even wilder, funkier, and more honest.
- Allison Russell - The Returner
Following her debut Outside Child, a standout from the year of black woman country, this maximalist masterpiece is the sweetest confirmation: Russell is the real deal. Slipping easily between Canadian French and American English and fully embodying both identities, calling out and calling in, provoking, celebrating, vibing-- The Returner is an *achievement*.
- Sufjan Stevens - Javelin
Suf turns death and grief into some of the best music of his career. Again.
- Cleo Sol - Heaven/Gold
The voice of SAULT releases two exquisite albums in one year, channeling her soul into twenty songs of faith and encouragement. What a time to be alive and blessed.
- Weval - Remember
Aggressive chillout music ("heavily contorted beats with the potential to destroy speakers"), paradox be damned. The closing track is sublime.
- Boygenius - The Record/The Rest
A trio of songwriters so ridiculously talented that they released the best side A of the year and still saved four arguably *even better* songs for the follow-up EP.
- Jamilla Woods - Water Made Me
Deeply honest complicated ambivalence about monogamy, plus maybe my song of the year.
- Disclosure - Alchemy
Y'all don't wanna hear me you just wanna dance.
- Slowdive - Everything Is Alive
A creature rising slowly from the oil of Elegia, body covered in a viscous coat, stepping out onto land and calmly proceeding to conquer kingdoms. Absolutely rips.
- noname - Sundial
noname paints an uncompromising, maybe unflattering portrait of herself on the cover of sundial and proceeds to do the same over eleven tracks of the most accomplished verse you'll hear this decade. A poet in full command of her self and her powers, self-released and self-actuated, noname isn't afraid to slap both the listener and herself in short order-- the much-written-about Namesake is of course an excellent example, but her equitable approach is all over this album.
There's an underlying joy that's hard to resist, the bossa nova beats that gird her unrelenting flow carrying you along until she whiplashes you with a chorus that implicates you in captialist death and oppression. These songs never turn up on my playlist without making me nod and pause. One minute I find some new treasure in the embarrassment of lyrical riches. The next, I'm facing my complicity in the evils arrayed against us. Sundial is a pox party, meant to innoculate you against despair by giving you just a little poison and then going hard all night. You'll either succumb or survive, but either way-- best party of the year.