© 2021 Jani Ojala
Kustantaja: BoD – Books on Demand GmbH, Helsinki, Suomi
Valmistaja: BoD – Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt, Saksa
ISBN: 978-952-80-3943-3
These opening words, as well as all the album-reviews, were written in the last four months of 2019.
It was the most significant decade of my life. I became an author, writing my first novel at age sixteen (2013), formed (2016) and ran a Facebook music-group for three years, went through puberty, collected over 350 (and counting) CDs, gained (2010), lost (2011), gained again (2014) and lost again (2018) weight in noticeable amounts, made all my best friendships (2010-2013), lost my virginity (2012), learned about love and family and myself, survived severe depression after years (20142017) of struggling. Smoked for the first time (2010), drank for the first time (2010), had my first kiss (2011).
The older I get the more poetic the ring is in the words that fate chose for my first words in this decade "voi vittu" ("Oh fuck"). Throughout the years and the changes, the losses and wins, the opportunities and misfortunes... to start it all with "oh fuck" originally felt regretful. Not because I was 13 and my parents didn't like me cursing. Just, wished I'd planned the words better.
Wanna know why those were the words I instinctively uttered in that moment? Because I'd just looked at the clock, and it was two minutes past midnight. I had plans in my mind, to do or say something extravagant, something super meaningful that night when the 2000's turned into the 2010's. I hadn't gotten around to finishing those plans before the moment arrived.
I don’t know how much of that fact sered a poetic purpose in the coming ten years. That stagnation. But eh.
But just... I didn't know how these ten years would turn out. Of course. I got n0 idea where I'll be in 2030 now, so it makes sense. But I knew I was gonna get a lot older in these ten years, in calendar-years, at the very least. As the ten years passed, the words "oh fuck" turned out to be just the words to say at the dawn of such an unpredictable, satisfying but also painful decade.
I remember every situation, setting and scenery I was in when a year has turned during this decade. The in-the-moment-ness of accidentally cursing at the fact a new decade had begun, cannot and should not get understated as the launching pad for that process of enjoying a NYE. It has turned into my favorite day of the year. Themes of ending the old and beginning the new hit me at every contemplative moment in any given December. It's an amazing opportunity for reflection, a good time to look back on things you have accomplished, as well as things you want to do better, and wish would turn out better, come new year. I'm a believer in that the energies, the mindsets and things you do on the last night of the year, is what defines the next year of your life in some ways, at least symbolic ones. There's big and small magics going around on a NYE. And this is the third New Decade's Eve I'll experience in my life. It's my favorite holiday of the year, a time of reflecting on the past and what went right or wrong - as I mentioned earlier - but above all, a time for looking forward, finding that security that life has certain beginnings and endings, even if your life doesn't start anew because of just one magical tic of the clock. This infatuation with New Year's Eve has even gone as far as to inspire my entire view of life. What is life, but a story?
A time of new beginnings, and looking back, I've been giving it conscious effort to have 2019 culminate things in my life, as if it was a big NYE in and of itself. Turns out, many of the culminations I didn't even have to carry out myself:
The making of this list has been an active goal for the last 2 years, and I base these 100 picks off the 2,000+ albums from 2010-2019 that I have heard.
Now this decade's just days away from ending. Welcome to my list of the greatest albums released in the last ten years.
Albums that almost made this list.
You know there's gonna be a bunch of these, with how extensive the research for this list was.
The Midnight Hour - Luke Cage (2016)
William Tyler - Goes West (2019)
Tycho - Dive (2015)
Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here (2010)
Sandwell District - Sandwell District (2011)
Jay-Z - 4:44 (2017)
Glue Trip - Glue Trip (2015)
Alex Sipiagin - Destinations Unknown (2011)
Andy Sheppard - Romaria (2018)
Tangerine Dream, Woody Jackson, The Alchemist, Oh No & DJ
Shadow - The Music of Grand Theft Auto V: Volume 2 - The
Score (2013)
Forest Swords - Engravings (2013)
Lars Danielsson - Liberetto II (2014)
Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma (2010)
Slowdive - Slowdive (2017)
Teyana Taylor - K.T.S.E. (2018)
AtomA - Skylight (2012)
William Tyler - Blue Ash Montgomery (2014)
Wooden Shjips - V. (2018)
Jonny Greenwood - Phantom Thread (2018)
Madlib - Madlib Medicine Show: No. 3 - Beat Konducta in Africa (2010)
Insomnium - Shadows of the Dying Sun (2014)
Kiasmos - Kiasmos (2014)
Dead When I Found Her - Rag Doll Blues (2012)
Tiluland - Axes of the Universe (2010)
Jonny Greenwood - The Master (2012)
Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers (2012)
Glue Trip - Glue Trip (2015)
Pallbearer - Foundations of Burden (2014)
Vijay Iyer - Far From Over (2017)
Kendrick Lamar - Section.80 (2011)
Steven Wilson - Grace for Drowning (2011)
Low - Double Negative (2018)
Janelle Monáe - The Electric Lady (2013)
Overkill - Ironbound (2010)
Milo - Things That Happen at Day // Things That Happen at
Night (2013)
Nails - Unsilent Death (2010)
King Creosote & Jon Hopkins - Diamond Mine (2011)
Fire! Orchestra - Enter (2014)
Om - Advaitic Songs (2012)
DJ Rozwell - None of This Is Real (2014)
Anderson .Paak - Ventura (2019)
Deathspell Omega - Paracletus (2010)
Manu Delago – Circadian (2019)
AND WELCOME TO THE 2020s!
(Dark Jazz)
It is sheer coincidence that the most brutal-looking, (I’ll say it) ugly cover-art out of the whole list is here first. The bulk of this cover-art is taken up by what I hope is not a dog or a similar animal’s burnt bones, but a burnt doll. Random black markings around its’ neck-area, a mouth that looks like the inside of a spoiled cantaloupe melon. Holes for eyes, and two perked-up ears, and some white lines that look as if the photoshop-process was unfinished. The background is just a wall of wooden planks, with a night-shaded sepia overlay.
It’s the lowest-ranking entry on the list – not a small accomplishment in and of itself, given the extent of big names even on the ”Honorable Mentions”-section – but also the one putting Michael Arthur Holloway/Dead When I Found Her in an elite grouping of just three artists that scored three entries on the list. I didn’t want to be as selective as I had to be, when limiting down the albums I wanted to talk about, into just hundred. A lot of people I’ve seen, who make big lists like this, make it a necessity to have a ”one album per artist” limit, and I just think that makes no sense.
The first and so far last Jazz venture by Holloway, this is really the first time the EBM-artist stretched his own artistic limits as far as this. And it was a successful venture. Granted, there’s no denying the Angelo Badala-menti/Twin Peaks influences of the album, but that really comes with the territory when you’re even conceiving of making a Dark Jazz album. The haunting, anxious snippets of dialogue that take these winding and slow-burning compositions into different planes of movement as easily as snapping a finger, are the most obvious thing setting Guilt Noir apart as just a thing of its’ own, but I take the intentionally more exploration-driven, winding nature of the compositions, as well as the potency they carry in the difficult mission of not outstaying their welcome, into an even bigger account setting Guilt Noir apart from the game.
This album invites you into a dizzying, haunted, foggy and unclear landscape with a style of music whose potency is still kind of underexplored by other artists in the medium of Jazz – making it even more of a curious irony that an Electronic artist could pull it off so well. The only kind of closure this album does achieve is being at rest (at last), like the final cut says. The closer is a perfect contrast-drawing cap-off for such a brutishly thought-provoking journey, in just how traditionally bluesy, short and apt, and generally peaceful it is in laying this nightmare-marred hour into its’ rest. It’s also not long enough to really take anything away from the rest of the album – which is like day and night from it tonally… but for something even deeper than that, I think it illustrates in the deepest way, how this record was and is a homage to the genre of Jazz in general, not just the Badalamentis of the world.
(Experimental Rock; Neoclassical Darkwave)
Just a facial shot of a tortured-looking female figure with hair blown back by something, drowned in a sharp color-scheme of dark-red and the darkest of black… this album’s cover art is not only an invitation to the musical experience, it is a statement in and of itself.
Released to wide acclaim – even getting the musical multitalent that is Anna, to conduct for the Nobel prize ceremony almost a year later – Dead Magic felt like a masterwork from the very first time listening to it. Its staggeringly electrifying performances, the seriousness like a dark confession, and amazing seamless progressions present in every track, cement that observation as truth.
Distant organs and crackling open things up for us. Things stay like this for the first full minute, after which The Truth, The Glow, The Fall's opening vocals immediately immerse the listener. From the jump Anna reveals all her cards as a songwriter, keeping a firm mysterious sensibility to every lyric – even when more descriptive and less poetic. The way this 12-minute track uses repetitions of musical phrases in the instrumentation, even pounding them percussion-first until they've reached their atmospheric maximum, is very reminiscent of a 2010s Swans-album. Later on, as the final act of the song sets in, you get an amazing vocal flex from Anna, who's going in by the throat, sounding like that red disturbed spirit of a lady in the cover and, in a way, really introducing us to the album just at that time. If the first half of the song showed us what Dead Magic is, the ending showed us where it's gonna go.
Following, The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra (whose title comes from one of Anna's middle names) lyrically tackles some sort of crisis within one's own identity/self. With an opening riff straight – if you count out the strings that welcome in the song – out of a Swans textbook, and some of the finest displays of vocal range by any female vocalist I encountered through my travels in 2018, the track easily carries you through its' runtime and keeps you hanging on every moment. The opening riff takes the song two thirds in and progressively gets more encapsulating as it pounds on. The switch between lead riffs is sudden but feels like such a vivid, real part of the track's overall stream-of-consciousness. Anna's vocals get higher by a pitch or two and menacingly throw closure at a song so desperate that resolve was never in the plans for it.
Closing side 1, the 16-minute piece Ugly and Vengeful takes things higher and further down at the same time, because by this time the "dark confession at an old abandoned church" vibe has come to its' climax, but while the atmosphere is intense and haunting, a noticeably big opening stretch is toned-down and generally slower... until it isn't. The progression 'round the 6-minute mark is quite possibly the most beautiful moment of this record, as the incrementally building churchaesthetic really escapes the track, blowing up into this well-arranged and infectious organ riff. When it breaks up and yet another electrifying performance by Anna kicks in, followed by pounding kickdrums, Ugly and Vengeful's lunacy comes full circle. This song is at the center of the tracklist for a reason. It is for all intents and purposes, its’ centerpiece.
Starting off Side B, the strictly-instrumental piece The Marble Eye brings back the organ for an expansive, pounding lead riff, which via subtle work at the lower register keeps elevating until the almost (at least by this album's standard) ”relaxing” track guides the way to the closer.
Källans återuppståndelse is the single most haunting, beaten-down form of ambiance I've heard. All that pain and struggle expressed through the monumental vocal performances and consistent darkness in the beginning, seems to have taken its' toll on the entire narrative of the album, and the cool, yet heartstring-pulling organ riff and fragile but melodic backing track give way to Anna's likely most heartfelt verse, accompanied by strings that just elevate everything a tier higher; to the altitude in which this album — potently — finishes.
Anna said once in an interview, that she wishes this album would cause listeners to accept mystery and ambiguity in an ”extremely materialistic society where everything needs to be explained.” That's a great sentiment to live and be inspired by, for someone who's an artist myself. Anna achieves her vision beautifully with her fourth album. Nothing is given to you straight here, but Dead Magic proves that just a consistent atmosphere and even a central mood can be the proper foundation anyone needs to make an album that will go down in the fan-community's collective consciousness, as one of the key albums of its' entire year.
(East Coast Hip Hop; Abstract Hip Hop)
The plainest pairing of black and white colors on this album, this cover-art jumped out immediately for the anime-like texture it achieved with nothing but a tombstone in the middle, titles written in black-on-white and white-on-black. A simple and effective image.
Ka’s discography is ten years deep, and with each subsequent release, seems to garner more attention. With this album – his easily-most noted and well-received – there were some controversies regarding his personal former work. Ka’s own response to the backlash was pretty quiet, minimal… but the whole instance showed me something about Hip Hop, and something about music in-general, that’s still as true as ever. It’s all entertainment. You can have the most resonant, expertly world-building bodies of work – something said about Ka plenty times by fans – and not actually be a character in any of your stories, in real life. I’ve been a fan of Kool G Rap for years, and one of the main points he always makes in interviews, when people asked his very explicitly criminal raps, going into a very vivid dimension when the 90s rolled around, is that Hip Hop is entertainment. Words are there to paint images. If you’re captivated by the story, and the story rewards your attention, does it really matter if the writer didn’t live every single beat of the story?
Of course it doesn’t.
Ka has had a stellar discography so far. Grief Pedigree (2012) was stellar and would’ve been on this list if it was a top 200. Subsequently to Honor Killed the Samurai being Ka’s most popular album, it’s also the most complete as a larger image of smaller snapshots.
A writer’s writer in the current era of New York rap, Ka adopts a protagonist-perspective so well, that moving from a revenge-plotting song to a song of conflict within one’s conscience, and then to a song of memories from childhood, all plays out seamlessly. The outlining, larger theme here is – as stated in the title – the dichotomy between street warriors and the historical precedent of the Samurai. Living an outlaw-lifestyle, forces one to make up their own rules and moral codes, to which the street-dweller holds on like the Samurai did to the code of honor instilled in them. It’s a good juxtaposition, between two worlds that are quite different on many fundamental levels, but similar in that one holds on to the code ingrained in them. They live and die with it. And when it’s life and death… the difference isn’t that huge after all.
What’s gonna strike people first here on this album is the slow pace of the rapping and the beats, as well as Ka's speech-like delivery. It’s an acquired taste, sure, but I find it gives the narrator – a role Ka adopts as well as he does that of a story-subject – more liberty, to use the tone of his voice for expression along with the lyrics. The amount of quotable lines on Honor Killed the Samurai is higher than that of any previous Ka records, and that attention to detail is heightened by how well these instrumentals play a background-part. They borrow the few musical elements from the soundscapes of the East, to which Ka, as well as the female-voice narrator allude to just as actively, giving the album a conceptual continuity that’s more rewarding with every replay.
(Ambient)
A very blurry image, of a grey wall, which has a white stripe near its’ bottom. This cover art is really easy to picture in your head.
Y’know, it was hard. Choosing the Hammock album that’d be most suitable for this list. Chasing After Shadows… Living With the Ghosts (2010) was my favorite piece by them for the longest, but what I’ve discovered, upon further inspection and listening to Mysterium and the 2010 record separately, is that Mysterium – which originally had a lower rating from me – just strikes a special kind of tone that never outstays its’ welcome, even with a runtime of over an hour. Revisiting this album doesn’t make certain moments feel less deserving, just more necessary than before
The peppered tracks with vocals on them, outline the emotional narrative of Mysterium in a super concrete way. Lyrics here are sparse, and each word you hear, over 58 minutes of music, could fit within one page of a CD booklet with ease, but it is the statement of those lyrics that seal the deal. The sentiment.
Hammock started out as a Post-Rock band, but have, on more occasions than one, ditched percussion in quest for ambiance that would better tell whatever story is intended on every which album. Although the arrangements of the strings and tonal guitars very much remember the Post-Rock roots, things have changed and that’s just somehow even more context to support this album’s claim as perhaps the greatest thing ever put out by the Nashville-based Post-Rock duo.
Mysterium has great dramatic effect. Theatrical, even. With its’ subdued progression and minimalist arrangement making sure to follow through a linear path of string-stroking high-sentiment beauty, it rewards that focus, that moment one has to take out of his day to hear this. The choral singing, really brings it home. To make a huge generalization, that’s something that’s not put in such good use with modern alternative music, traditionally. Here, Marc and Andrew use just as much of it as is necessary, and the more I listen to the album, the more I realize it’s one of the purest realizations of a very abstract pre-planned vision of an album. There was clearly something very solid and rock-hard in the department of Mysterium’s concept.
Confirming that belief even further, is the fact that this is a tribute album to Clark Kern, a ”son-like figure to Marc Byrd”, as said on their Bandcamp page, ”who died in 2016 from the tumor strain NF2” .
I can’t find the exact quote where it is said, but there’s a distinct memory I have from 2017, of someone saying this album was made to be a musical image of death. While I’m not sure how enamored the band was with visions of death, how obsessed with their own visions of it, the album sure does ceaselessly take you places without ever really stopping anywhere, in a way that feels… final…
(Indie Pop; Dream Pop)
This record’s cover-art is just pure eye-candy. White dots scattered on top of a black canvas, in a way that resembles just, like, a casino-floor’s roof or some other light-spectacle of the sort. This light-spectacle looks daunting yet distantly inviting when stripped of the rainbow of colors it must’ve possessed.
I’d like to start this writeup by saying that Myth is the strongest opening track of any Beach House record. Most of my online-friends from music groups are big Beach House fans, and so a statement like that might create controversy in our group-chat; therefore I am putting my foot down with this statement. The song is their most popular one, according to statistics from Spotify and Last.fm, and even though popular opinion should only give a music-explorer an idea of where to start rangin’, I – someone who already loved Teen Dream (2010) and Devotion (2008) beyond description – looked into the song more, finding out that the almost-universally-agreed-upon magnum work of Beach House is the opener to my third-favorite record of theirs. Just this year I fell in love with Myth, really. And while it’s not my favorite song of theirs – that accolade goes to Space Song – the best way for me to sum the song up, is that I love it because Beach House sounds the most Beach House on it. Devotion came out two years before this decade, so I won’t be able to access the list unfortunately. However I have written a review for it before on RYM (RateYourMusic), and in that review I stated that this is ”a moment when a band finds itself, its’ own sound: one that would go on to inspire a lot of their peers”.
The Beach House sound was good. It was so good it birthed the two arguably most influential Dream Pop records of the early 2010s. This and Teen Dream (which will be in the top 20 of this list). Myth however… I dunno, I keep coming back to it. It has an aptly mythical way of sounding like the most pure and complete manifestation of that sound.
A friend of mine from that group-chat (what up, Jay) said in his review of Teen Dream, that the albums’ weakness is in its’ track-listing, stacking the first half full of such memorable songs, that the latter half – in his opinion – pales in comparison to. And while the latter half of this album’s tracks are more subdued, Take Care from the predecessor is considered among many fans to have ”let the ball down” from the huge momentum that tracks 1-6 (or 1-8 in some interpretations) had built. In the summer of 2018 I was obsessed with Teen Dream, and Take Care is one of my favorite tracks from the record. New Year is also one of my favorite tracks from this one, as is On the Sea. It doesn’t skew the momentum in any ways, in my opinion, but rather takes it somewhere unexpected. Now, subversion can be an all-out bad thing to a lot of music-listeners and art-appreciators of the like. To me it can be good. It’s like they added a The Bends track to close off OK Computer. A lot of people can and will find it to be out of place, but to me it adds a level of character to the overall record.
I actually wouldn’t mind Street Spirit or My Iron Lung ending OK Computer, now that I think about it…
But that’s another conversation. I don’t fault people, for feeling like it’s out-of-character for a band that… characteristically bathes their music in rich instrumental aesthetics. It makes perfect sense. But just, at least for me, Beach House does a very graceful job of dimming the lights down a little bit before they shut them off
(Neo-Soul)
This album’s cover-art is a midnight-blue-shaded collage of people at their craft or throwing pondersome looks outside. A very deliberate Jazz-tribute that’s also a visual Jazz experience.
Even aside from my love of Adrian Younge’s music – especially the collaborative stuff with A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali – the first thing I should mention here is that I owe my sincerest gratitude to The Midnight Hour for introducing me to Eryn Allen Kane. One of the most amazing vocalists I’ve heard this whole decade, period. She’s got a small body of work, as of the time of me writing this, but even with that being noted, she’s demonstrated in an impressively short time that she can juggle any kind of a track and make it sound like hers, make it sound like the ultimate combustion of heart and talent. Just marvelous.
Not even a grudge, but a tick in some listeners' minds could be the fact that this album – the duo's first full-length studio album that's not a soundtrack – seems to use all of its' heaviest guns early. The threesong stretch around the start, from It's You, to Questions to So Amazing was a strong contender for the strongest three-song streak of 2018. With amazing songwriting, well-laid performances by legendary soul singers (respectively Raphael Saadiq, Cee Lo Green and Luther Vandross), and traditionally structured soul songs only in smaller doses for the remaining 13 numbers of the tracklist, The Midnight Hour seems to set itself up. But it doesn't. Right from the first instrumental piece following this three-strike combo (Gate 54), it's put into perspective what is the force really morphing The Midnight Hour into the experience it is, before our ears. It's the full musical acknowledgment of influences from Jazz and Neo-Soul, by the execproducer powerhouse that masterminds Ali and Adrian form into, that elevated even the contemporary Soul numbers into what they came out as. The live aesthetic and in-the-moment feel on this record are never lost, their foundation is impenetrable. It’s a stunning and consistent job throughout. Even the more out-there lead vocal contribution by Bilal on the track Do It Together battles the lounge-evoking instrumental – some brilliantly embellished strings here on this track, as well – for a spot in the forefront. Redneph in B Minor follows these loungeaspirations, and is also ”the most Adrian Younge” this album gets. With drums leading the mix of the instrumental piece, and guitar swerving round and ’bout in its' second half, the track manages in less than 3 minutes to both be progressive, and show all the depth, colors of its' ingredients. Closing the first half, Better Endeavor, another instrumental piece exactly as long as the previous, takes its' drumming into a more Hip Hop breaks-direction á la Ali, with extremely lyrical strings on top of a bass narration, which the track later breaks down into. These two instrumental pieces here, together, show the best of both worlds in terms of this unlikely but natural collaboration. These creative minds' musical backgrounds they have the most proficiency in, might vary, but w all shades of modern-age Neo-Soul, the direction of the record is kept strong for the second half's setup.
Opening the second half, Smiling for Me is another contemporary soul number. Lyrics evoking imagery and reminiscent of wonderful moments in the past, combined with colorful strings and infectious drumming that sounds even more live and in-the-moment than anything I'd heard from the album before; it's been a key virtue of the record all along, but highlighted the best on the song that's the most simple on-paper, and the most direct.
Things take an even more mellow direction on the following Don't Keep Me Waiting. The pattern is more or less repeated here, as there's female guest vocals again, paired with even more mood-inducing strings than before... this time the drums are mixed an inch more subtly, and the lyrics are looking more in the future than in the past; a passionate love-declaration by Marsha Ambrosius.
Following, Bitches Do Voodoo is just what it says it is.
The next song, Possibilities, also carrying in the vein of contemporary Soul songs, is Adrian expanding upon the ideas of a Something About April (2011) track with more horns and an all-around more straightforward umph.
The instrumental piece Mission picks things up from here, and is the biggest Drum Thunder Suite Adrian has pulled off yet in all of his albums. With the companion of a phat bassline added, these three minutes are almost (again) like the two worlds colliding, until the halfway-mark which finds Mission breaking into something of an alien Soul tune. Alternating riffs between eight measures and abruptly breaking up into just a mere sound of wind blowing... it seems like this was meant to be like a lowkey centerpiece of the album, because it did seem like a compaction of the idea this album's meant to fulfill. Judging from how loosely they heed rules of normalcy in their structures on this record's songs, it seems like the feverish, unflinching determination to progress each song into something larger was the exact mission the Hip Hop legend and new-age Neo-Soul trendsetter set out on.
The French-sung Dans Un Moment D'errance, featuring The Roots' drummer and spiritual leader ?uestlove, takes this blowing wind and turns it to a humming, then a song that – while I admittedly don't get a word of – is just gorgeous on an aesthetic level.
After the song, Eryn Allen Kane (from Possibilities) returns to lay vocals on Love Is Free, but this time she declares her entrance with a strong throat-clear, which is fitting because her vocals here are the ballsiest it gets during the Hour. They don't leave much for the composer's collective force to do, besides create a backdrop. A good album has all these strengths here and there and sometimes everywhere that you could point out, like a magnificent or even iconic song or even two, or just staggering consistency or one or two areas, but amazing albums see that they utilize, balance but never sacrifice their strengths. There was no point in trying to outdo Eryn's vocals here even if Adrian and Ali could've. All it needed was a backdrop that didn’t add too much to what is already great and well-accomplished as a song.
Together Again follows this, and sees not one but two legends contributing, Hip Hop producer-giant No I.D. and The Soulquarians' keyboardist James Poyser as soloist. It's much in the vein of a lot of instrumental pieces earlier in the tracklist, but with the collaboration adding an extra dose of spice to things.
Feel Alive takes things into a much subtler direction, with full Lounge Music-swing accomplished by this point, and another set of absolutely powerful guest vocals in form of a confession of love, drenched in vulnerability.
The penultimate track, a spin on the title of a Jazz standard with some lyricism around its' sentiment, is the shortest track and sees a sweet-ass vocal contribution by Venice Dawn (the band Adrian formed in early2010s) singer Saudia Yasmein.
Closing the record, the instrumental piece Ravens is Adrian and Ali in their freest form for 2½ minutes.
It's been established that Ali and Adrian together can do no wrong, but with their creative worlds colliding into something as fruitful as this collaborative project, it was already after the first Luke Cage soundtrack (2016), that high time came that they'd embark on a full-length album. Back when I was fantasizing about that, this is exactly what I fantasized.
(Electroacoustic; Ambient; Drone)
Well this is just one of those album arts I wish I could include as it is, because I have no idea how to even begin to explain this one.
Recording most of this album in Japan during his stay at the outskirts of Tokyo back in the beginning of 2018, might have been the right move for Tim, as his previous album Love Streams was met with less than universal acclaim – an album that, personally to me was an introduction to his form of Glitch music, but didn't go on to serve much of other function in the long run for me. Not to say I won’t thank it for the memories whenever it’s brought up. The great quantity of releases that outshone that album’s technical aspects, which I discovered later on – many of those being Tim Hecker’s own earlier albums – ended up overshadowing the experience. Which is fine, it happens. It does seem like this trip, however, provided his music with some new inspiration that many music fans think he needed at that time. Although I tend to disagree with that notion. He’s clearly always been great.
It’s just very clear that a new inspiration was found on that trip to Japan.
The Electroacoustic approach of Konoyo ends up working really well for something that was never done this way prior. Hecker's always been known for his immaculate palet of sound-choices, and right from the opening song This Life, things get a controlled kind of extreme. The formless arrangements Hecker's music is known for are still as present as ever on this, clearly, and the opening 8-minute track introduces the listener to the kind of technician this man really is with a wild anxious lingering feeling that characterizes it. It's amazing all these wild ideas, just in terms of sounds, can coalesce so naturally while never doing anything further to the song's relentless progression than strictly elevate it.
The brilliantly manipulated, almost broken piano sounds of the track In Death Valley are another big, early highlight.
Is a Rose Petal's texture is so wild and out there it sounds like it can barely resist becoming the frontal attraction of the song at the beginning, and ultimately every element progressing into a field of equal interplay, is such a fulfilling moment provided by the shortest track of the whole record.
Closing the first half, Keyed Out is the big, jarring midway-highlight. At 9 minutes of runtime, it progresses from ultra-musical white noise haphazard interplay between perhaps the most impressively big set of different sounds, and an obscure ambiance whose functionality can only be explained by Tim's extraordinary production-skills, making this diverse palét of sounds clash and having the outcome still be this musical… this song was the album’s second single for a good cause. It encapsulates all the strengths of Konoyo just as well as the opener did.
The second half's opener, In Mother Earth Phase has a central ambiance (almost like a quasi-harmony) of computer-manipulated wind-instruments and strings that is to die for, really. On-paper it's not like anything you'd normally hear and have feel organic, but the sound comes off as very organic nonetheless. While the fainted strings start to gather more wind beneath their feathers just past the halfway mark, the progression-driven composition reaches a brand new emotional high. The huge 10-minute piece is without a wasted moment, and stands out – surprisingly, for an album with this many standouts already – as a sublime highlight.
Following this, A Sodium Codec Haze is a shorter track but not without providing its piece of the equation; it's a high-altitude ambient track whose tingling keys, manipulated to a higher register, leave a pronounced yet abstract impression that's more straight-forward than its' collage-esque, more extended counterparts from this record.
The closer of the album, Across to Anoyo is a final ode to this obvious newfound creative zone Tim managed to capture in his travels. It is not that in the conventional way, through cheesy oriental sounds but with something that Hecker's music rarely sees: a piece of percussion; created via the use of a testing-sound of an oriental chord struck on an acoustic guitar, and a kickdrum-sound cut in half. Post-production really did wonders for this percussive element, and it follows Konoyo's pattern of unusual ideas coming together in a stunningly lyrical way. This crossfades and the composition is off to some staggering and fastpaces progressions, going by like a stream of vivid memories and culminating into a conversation of different kinds of ambient sections, in different frequencies, just like a defining, final clash of ideas for this album which set the premise of being just that, a clash, in itself. It followed through that challenge with amazing consistency; big enough for me to speak of it at the end of the decade. Never hesitant to take risks in expressing its' colorful ideas, ultimately, Konoyo fulfills a staggering mission.
Konoyo is an inescapably inspired album, a consistent mood-piece dense enough to work as a meditation, and also, from an artistic standpoint, by-a-large a declaration of breaking out from a musical safety. It's a delicious mixture of obscure ingredients. It's not a collage of huge highlights, or a stream of thought. It's both of those things, and it's an entity of its' own in being that.
(Indie Rock; Post-Punk Revival)
Two infrared hands reach up while holding onto each other. In the middle there’s the band-name and the anagram-title, colored a potent blue.
This band was never the type to churn out albums fast, 1 or 2 years after the other. The three-or-four-year gaps they’ve taken on the release of every record since 2004’s Antics, gives off the idea that all albums are being worked hard at, to distinguish them from everything else in the catalog. It is with this likeable quality of Interpol, that it’s even sadder to recognize the fact that they never really had that much range to begin with. Our Love to Admire (2007) and Interpol (2010), for lack of a better word, sucked.
Then, coming back after 4 years, Interpol surprised me. They’ve been one of my favorite bands ever since I discovered El Pintor, really. Turn On the Bright Lights (2002) is a classic and one of my all-time favorite records, and Antics is a continuation of what made that album great; what made that album a landmark in post-9/11 New York indie music and the simultaneous Post-Punk Revival movement.
…And then, out of nowhere, a band whose criticism – from people like me – about ”changing things up too much” and ”not changing enough” pretty much defined their public image in the internet communities… showed what they can do, again.
If you took guitars into account first, before anything else, this would be Interpol’s best album. The band is ten years older now, than they were on their first two albums – which still remain the most highly acclaimed. There is an awareness here, that you can’t do things the exact same way you did back in your golden days. The songwriting here has the same kind of vague, self-deprecating and self-ironic twitch that set Interpol apart from the slew of Indie Rock bands coming out in the early 2000s with the lengths it would go. Just now it’s got a more reflective tone to it, a more reflective, self-referential edge. The record is true to its’ roots of Post-Punk music, a genre that was started on the basis of the relationship those bands had with their own fact of being Punk music. The awareness. So it was a strange trek music had to take, for bands like Interpol or The Strokes or even Editors to come and translate their grand Post-Punk Revival message into the minds of contemporary listeners. Their level of relevancy might be more leveled and there might not be such a novelty to this sound of Rock music anymore, but in a lot of ways El Pintor is an older, wiser Interpol record with a lot of catchy songs, sticking riffs and songwriting that’s stylistically true to the band’s roots, but still says something new while landing consistently.
It brings out the best of a great band whose golden years were thought to be over.
(Jazz Fusion; Post-Bop)
A prism over a black canvas, with all performing artist’s names in their respective corners (clockwise: Dave Holland, Eric Harland, Kevin Eubanks, Craig Taborn).
Dave Holland’s four-piece ensemble get to work on unusual Jazz Fusion. Just mere piano, fender rhodes, drums, bass and guitar taking us through a journey reaching extrasolar heights at its’ most grandiose. As far as composition, this album gets its’ due praise from me, managing to base all of its’ tracks around at least one memorable riff. The effortless transitions between tunes and soloing add to the fluid nature of this album. It’s excellent background music for doing something quiet and slow; really takes your mind places even with nothing else going on. And Eubanks totally shreds during his solos.
’Tis worth mentioning, and pondering how this man – the bassist credited in all of Miles Davis’ definitive Fusion Jazz records from Filles de Kilimanjaro (1969) to Live-Evil (1971) – was able to manage a Fusion album this good, this catchy and worthy of keeping your attention, way into his sixties. I went over his formula. Maybe in some cases, having a good formula with how you compose your music, is all that counts.
Bass-lead Jazz albums sound like a challenge, by just hearing the mere idea. Bass is usually so low-register, such a supporting instrument in whatever mixture, but what shines through on this record – especially on the slower cuts here – is how much of a presence it entails. All other moving parts often even circulate around it. The Empty Chair is a good example of how much command Dave’s bass actually has here, with one bass solo accompanied only by a three-note ambiance courtesy of the rhodes.
The slower and the quicker, the reflective and the striking compositions on Prism create contrast that give it character and longlasting replay-value. It lets the ambitions of the composition of this record, really shine as its’ put into perspective. But the sheer shredding is what entices me the most.
(Psychedelic Rock;
Garage Rock)
Green, green and black, with two red revils on each side, and lightning striking above their heads symmetrically on each side. The band-name on the upper side of the cover-art has a stark shadow to it, in the center of the image a big black hand is holding a heaven and a world below it, all on a tall mountain of Mountain Dew-green shadows on black rock.
At the center in the bottom is a pink brain, and the album title. I’m in Your Mind Fuzz.
This is one trippy cover.
King Gizzy’s music became somewhat of an oversaturated commodity in 2017, and that’s the most recent association my mind really holds of them. It seems as though they showed and played all their cards back then, eventually to an exhausting degree. Kicking off the – by all means, productive – year with the fresh idea of having five albums, all with different conceptual premises, my hopes were high, and while most of the full bodies of music really never went below the line of decent… oversaturation – the word I used at the beginning there – really is what took, indeed, place.