I’ve generally tried to strike a balance in this newsletter between discussing things I love — and why I love them — and recommending them to people who haven’t discovered them yet. It’s a balance which has shifted from time to time, but just for today I want to firmly push it towards recommendations, with the advent of the Official tiny mammal kingdom Album Recommendation Flowchart, my proudest child:
It is not necessarily a particularly serious tool, but I’m nevertheless very (too) proud of it. You can find an expanded version here (I think it is likely to be more-or-less illegible in substack), and a text version here. I also made a playlist with the specific songs I recommend from each album:
It’s an, uh, eclectic bunch when all put together like this, and note that the songs I’ve selected are based on a few factors: the songs which best sum up the album as a whole; my personal favourites; and an attempt at figuring out what the best track is as opposed to my favourites. Not every song meets all of these criteria, though.
Below, you’ll find brief introductions to each of the albums, arranged by year of release and, within years, by title. A few caveats: the albums which feature here are not necessarily my favourite albums — there are a bunch of bands who don’t get a look-in who really deserve one, but I’ve generally excluded the artists who I tend to feel most people will have already discovered. The albums featured are either well-known albums I think a lot of people won’t have listened to, or albums I feel deserve a little more attention.
Edit to add: massive thanks to the wonderful Rosemary (@rosemarypnewman on twitter), who made a playlist with every song from every album, all in one place:
Before we get into the albums proper, a note that the unholy little ‘post too long for email’ warning has been flashing at me basically the whole time I’ve been writing this, so it will probably get cut off pretty early if you’re viewing this as an email; click here to view it in your browser and get the full experience.
I'd love to hear from you if you discovered new music through this post! Just reply to this email or comment on twitter, facebook, or at the bottom of this newsletter — or consider sharing it:
This post wouldn’t have been possible without the support of a bunch of people, but particularly Mia and Kim, for helping to edit it, and Fin, for calling out some questionable decisions in early versions of the flowchart, checking the text version, and ‘being my enabler, inspiration, muse, and best friend’ (I was told to write this).
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For Your Pleasure (1973) — Roxy Music
Roxy Music’s second album, For Your Pleasure was the last to feature Brian Eno, and it would be easy to pretend the album’s brilliance is only a product of Eno’s presence. I’m thwarted in these efforts, though, by the thing which makes lead singer Bryan Ferry being a tory disappointing, as opposed to just annoying: For Your Pleasure is fantastic because the entire band delights in their music’s strangeness to the extent that even I struggle to attribute its peculiarity solely to Brian Eno. Tensions with Ferry would lead to Eno quitting the band only a few months after this album’s release, but For Your Pleasure feels like a product of the pair working in almost perfect — if temporary — harmony. The two were committed to the combination of their avant-garde, art school sensibilities with American R&B. While each comes to the fore at different moments, with ‘For Your Pleasure’, for example, featuring few vocals from Ferry and most of the track highlights Eno’s disorienting manipulation of the mixing board, there’s a push/pull dynamic which works to huge effect. This is most notable on ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’, which opens with an extended, Pop-Art inflected, and honestly terrifying vocal performance from Ferry over minimal instrumentation before the music stops in its tracks on the one and a tearing, Eno-driven guitar solo by Phil Manzanera cuts in and obliterates all semblance of sense.
Song recommendation: ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’
Another Green World (1975) — Brian Eno
Another Green World, for whatever you want to say about the genius of Eno’s Oblique Strategies, the chaos and stress of the recording sessions, and its role in the development of huge amounts of classic and important music, is an almost unbearably gorgeous album. It feels at its best like drifting into something at once massively consequential and insignificantly small, like finding meaning simply through contemplation and space and specificity (‘Look at a very small object, look at its center,’ reads one Oblique Strategy). Talking to NME, Eno describes finding the inspiration for the album’s title in a sci-fi book, in which space voyagers discover a habitable world which is identical to Earth: ‘they’d originally left to find something better and arrived in the end — which was actually the same place. Which is how I feel about myself. I’m always trying to project myself at a tangent and always seem eventually to arrive back at the same place.’ If you’re interested in this album, then congratulations! You get to read Mike Powell’s wonderful and hugely informative review of Another Green World, one of my favourite pieces of music writing.
Song recommendation: ‘The Big Ship’
Remain In Light (1980) — Talking Heads
Remain In Light is such a wonderfully clever, experimental, strange album that it feels like it must have come from nowhere, just a moment of blinding inspiration. Except it didn’t: indeed, David Byrne experienced extreme writer’s block as he tried to write the lyrics, and it was actually recorded as a deliberate attempt to move the band away from its reliance on his songwriting. Songs were originally developed through collaborative jams with lyrics only written after the instrumentation was more-or-less set, and Byrne adopted a stream-of-consciousness lyrical approach which decentred his intentions even further. While this was a shift in the band’s recording process, however, it was not anything like a clean break: the lyrics still return to Byrne’s preoccupations with paranoia and distance, and the sound — not to mention the decentring of Byrne’s lyrics — is already visible on Fear of Music’s ‘I Zimbra’ and even before. Though it sounds on first listen like little else, it owes an enormous debt both to funk and electronics, but also to African polyrhythms and, in particular, the music of Fela Kuti. It all comes together into something remarkable, but very much of this world — and that’s its beauty.
Song recommendation: ‘Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)’
Painful (1993) — Yo La Tengo
There’s a few facts about Yo La Tengo which tell you essentially everything you need to know about why you should love this band. First, the name is a joke about baseball: in 1962, the New York Mets agreed to shout ‘yo la tengo’ instead of ‘I’ve got it’ to foster multilingual communication (read: stop running into a player who could only speak Spanish), a stunning solution to a totally insignificant problem which ended in disaster when a player who hadn’t got the memo ran straight into another player and asked ‘what’s a yellow tango?’; the band thought this was funny enough to be their name. Second, Yo La Tengo features one of the rarest things in music: its vocalist duties are shared between a genuinely happy couple who’ve been married for decades, guitarist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley, who first met at a Feelies gig in the ‘80s, bonded over their encyclopaedic musical knowledge, and have been making music together ever since. Third, they’ve released multiple amazing covers records, but my favourite is Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics, a compilation of impossibly sweet covers recorded at their annual fundraising shows for independent radio station WFMU in which they take live requests for essentially any song ever released and have five minutes to work out how to cover it. This is the information you need to appreciate Yo La Tengo, a collection of wonderful dorks whose music is gorgeous, melancholy, and generous. I could have chosen any number of albums, but Painful is my favourite: it boasts accurately titled songs like sweet, sad, anxious ‘A Worrying Thing’ and ‘Sudden Organ’, which begins exactly as you would expect, alongside wonderful instrumentals and two versions of the same song, ‘Big Day Coming’, one with a floating, melancholy organ and one with a chugging, scuzzy guitar. It’s kind of genius. I saw them live once — a remarkably lovely christmas gift from my then-girlfriend — and it felt like sinking into a much-loved seat.
Song recommendation: ‘Nowhere Near’
The Lonesome Crowded West (1997) — Modest Mouse
If you’ve heard a Modest Mouse track, odds are it’s not from The Lonesome Crowded West; it’s probably ‘Float On’. 2004’s Good News for People Who Love Bad News, which ‘Float On’ appears on, was their hit (it went platinum), but it’s The Lonesome Crowded West I love. The band’s second album, it’s a testament to what Matt LeMay, reviewing Good News for Pitchfork, describes as their crowning achievement: ‘to forge a unique and recognizable sound from the most basic elements of rock music’. Between drummer Jeremiah Green, bassist Eric Judy, and singer/guitarist Isaac Brock, Modest Mouse created an album which sits firmly inside both rock conventions and a specific scene — the Pacific Northwest — but sounds utterly unlike almost anything else; there’s a huge amount of experimentation and strangeness on this album. The contradiction of The Lonesome Crowded West is that it’s firmly rooted in genre and place (the album’s title refers to the claustrophobic loneliness of the endless suburbs and strip malls coming to dominate the region) while having this almost visionary approach. The band finds something peculiar about vastness and something expansive in specificity, just as its characters find cities lonely and deserts claustrophobic.
Song recommendation: ‘Cowboy Dan’
American Water (1998) — Silver Jews
Silver Jews are nothing if not perennial outsiders. Frontman David Berman — who was Jewish, and was also a poet, releasing a collection, Actual Air, in 1999 — has described the band’s name as referring to ‘the outsiders to the outsiders’, and even in the indie rock scene Berman was part of he never quite fit in. His band was frequently regarded — erroneously — as an offshoot of member Stephen Malkmus’s much more successful Pavement. Anecdotes in which Silver Jews intersect with other, more recognised acts tend to show them only coming into contact at oblique angles, like how some of the first music the members started recording together was done as what could, I suppose, be considered prank calls into the answering machine of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. Berman, literary-minded and without much of a singing voice (‘all my favourite singers couldn’t sing’, he says on ‘We Are Real’), never seemed like someone you expect to be creating rock. AmericanWater’s songs are beautiful, and there are moments you could imagine these songs getting radio play if Stephen Malkmus was singing, but it’s all channeled through Berman’s blunt, loping voice and elusive lyrics — which themselves are preoccupied endlessly with failure and standing outside of things. When it all comes together into something tuneful or catchy it feels almost like the band stumbled into it by accident; but, in its way, it’s more beautiful for that.
Song recommendation: ‘Smith & Jones Forever’
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998) - Neutral Milk Hotel
What can you say about this album? It’s one of the most peculiarly intimate recordings I’ve ever heard: you can’t shake the feeling that you’re somehow sharing the same space as Jeff Mangum, and the tenderness with which he treats his subject matter is extraordinary. He handles so many different strands, recollections, and histories, all intersecting with one another, and it’s an astonishing musical achievement, with a range of found sounds and unusual instruments weaving around the core of Mangum’s voice and guitar. He balances maximalist tracks like ‘Holland, 1945’ with the tenderness of ‘Communist Daughter’, the album ebbing and flowing as it goes on. For all that, though, it’s easy to forget that it’s a written and produced thing, that it didn’t just flow unprompted from Mangum’s soul — a testament to how fluid and how personal the album as a whole is. It’s just astonishing, an absolutely perfect piece of music.
Song recommendation: ‘Holland, 1945’
Circulatory System (2001) — Circulatory System
While Neutral Milk Hotel deserves all the credit it gets, Circulatory System’s self-titled first album demonstrates that the wider ecosystem of Elephant 6 deserves far more attention. The music collective originated by Jeff Mangum (of Neutral Milk Hotel), Robert Schneider (of the Apples in Stereo), Will Cullen Hart, and the late Bill Doss (both of Olivia Tremor Control), feels like it only gets a look-in these days as a footnote to the wider story of Neutral Milk Hotel. Circulatory System is far more than a footnote. It shares the interest in ‘60s-style psychedelic pop that characterises much of Elephant 6’s approach — you can definitely notice the shared DNA with Aeroplane — but it contrasts Mangum’s sometimes frantic energy and distinctive voice with a somewhat subdued atmosphere, at once wistful and meditative. If Mangum’s music can tend towards the sound of a bad trip, Circulatory System feels like a very good one, a comfortable but revelatory drift downstream. Though tracks called ‘Joy’ and ‘The Lovely Universe’ indicate the album’s generally optimistic slant, it’s got an undeniable melancholy and menace in certain moments, which just serves to deepen the whole.
Song recommendation: ‘Joy’
The Glow, Pt. 2 (2001) — The Microphones
The Microphones — really just a solo project for Phil Elverum — recently released their first album since 2003’s Mount Eerie (which gave the name of Elverum’s next project), entitled Microphones in 2020. It’s a staggeringly beautiful introspective look at Elverum’s life making music and his relationship with success. In revisiting the Microphones, he indicates how he finds himself returning to his youth and relating to his younger self, even though he thought he would have matured by now. Appropriate, then, to return to The Glow, Pt. 2, an album that could be comfortably understood as Elverum’s abiding masterpiece and with which, more than any other work, Microphones in 2020 is in dialogue. There’s something alive in this album: alive in the way that Elverum masters the magic trick of seeming to directly record his emotions and the nature which echoes them back to him, somehow perfectly evoking the texture of the sea, for instance, in a soundscape unlike any other. Alive, also, in the unusually fluid recording process, in which Elverum improvised and invented his music even as he taped it, an impulsive, intuitive method which uses the recording process as an instrument itself. In 2020, Elverum recalls how he settled on the Microphones ‘because I loved recording and the equipment seemed to be living, / and it sang to me like static interference.’ It still does.
Song recommendation: ‘I Want Wind to Blow’
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001) — Wilco
It’s pretty likely you’ve heard a few tracks from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, especially if you were around back in the early 2000s. Its release was honestly quite a saga: the planned, oddly portentous release date of 11th September 2001 got delayed after the band quit their label, but on 18th September 2001, after MP3s of the album started showing up online, the band streamed it from their website themselves. It finally got officially released in April 2002. The original release date’s eventual significance was somewhat appropriate: although the album was written and recorded prior to 9/11, many of its tracks appear to refer to its events, like ‘Jesus, etc.’, which contains the lyrics ‘tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad sad songs… skyscrapers are scraping together’. The album’s cover even boasts an image of two towers standing side-by-side (Chicago’s Marina City complex). All of this — the fraught release process, the hints of prophecy — shouldn’t, however, distract from the fact that this is a genuinely fantastic album, extremely creative but filled with beautiful and accessible songs. It’s frankly an outstanding achievement.
Song recommendation: ‘Jesus, etc.’
Kill the Moonlight (2002) — Spoon
Spoon are an odd band. They’re one of those artists whose discography boasts a bunch of songs which could be classed as hits, but whose cultural footprint doesn’t seem to extend beyond a lot of people having heard ‘Inside Out’. As I write this, I’m looking at Kill the Moonlight’s album page on Spotify: ‘The Way We Get By’, the band’s third most-played song on the streaming service, has nearly thirty million plays; only two others on the record break a million. I hate to — and yet I frequently do — sound like one of those ‘they deserve more’ people, a defensive posture I associate more with Marvel fans than anyone, and yet I can’t help but find Spoon’s level of recognition strange. Spoon’s frontman, Britt Daniel, has an undeniable charisma to him which feels like it recalls those long-lived, legendary lead singers — your Nick Caves, Bruce Springsteens, Lou Reeds, whoever. Kill the Moonlight has moments of pathos and joy, aggressive and exciting guitars on ‘Jonathon Fisk’ and the stripped-down, ethereal ‘Paper Tiger’ whose beauty happens in the gaps between its reversed drum beats. It’s a fun, anxious, appealing album; Daniel’s vocal performances are uniformly fantastic; the band is absurdly tight and responsive. It’s great.
Song recommendation: ‘Paper Tiger’
You Forgot It In People (2002) — Broken Social Scene
While Broken Social Scene’s first album, Feel Good Lost, focuses on ambient instrumentals, and their members had cut their teeth in experimental, arty bands in Toronto, for You Forgot It In People they ditched all that and started making straightforwardly catchy, compelling rock. Not only is it substantially more accessible than their previous work, it also takes in a huge range of different styles: traces of ambient linger on tracks like ‘Pitter Patter Goes My Heart’, while ‘Shampoo Suicide’ layers a huge range of instruments for a much more maximalist sound, ‘I’m Still Your Fag’ attempts — and more than succeeds at — acoustic heartbreak, and ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl’ highlights Emily Haines’ vocals and seems at times to recall sample techniques in its use of repetition. For all its accessibility, it’s far from simple or conventional, and the huge range of influences come together extremely well.
Song recommendation: ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl’
Magnolia Electric Co. (2003) — Songs: Ohia
There’s a lot that feels big about Magnolia Electric Co., generally accepted as the late Jason Molina’s best album as Songs: Ohia. Opener and highlight ‘Farewell Transmission’ is one of two songs to stretch to over seven minutes, and boasts rousing choruses and a huge band. The twelve musicians featured on the track recorded live and improvised (when Molina repeats ‘listen’ towards the end of the song, it’s an instruction to the band to listen out for the song’s conclusion; they stop in almost perfect synchrony), and there’s an occasional sense of awestruck scale across the album, but especially here. Molina sings about the ‘fossil fire of the sun’, a ‘big star about to fall’; he asserts that ‘there ain’t no end to the desert I’ll cross’. Yet there’s also a stunning spareness to the album, visible both in the frequently minimal instrumentation and in Molina’s habit of self-negation — a song is titled ‘Almost Was Good Enough’, for instance — and maybe summed up by the one imperative Molina offers: ‘Just Be Simple’. While the album looks for scale and meaning and beauty, it’s more interested in the small stuff, in finding humour (on ‘Just Be Simple’, he sings ‘everything you hated me for — honey, there was so much more: I just didn’t get busted’), and above all in trying to be better. On bonus track ‘The Big Game Is Every Night’, featured on the posthumously-released expanded version of the album, Molina sings:
and the last thing I see
let it be me helping;
let it be me, honestly,
let it be me working
on being a better me.
Song recommendation: ‘Farewell Transmission’
Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone (2003) — The Unicorns
More than anything, this album is just extremely fun. Though the Unicorns’ short existence was frequently fractious, their single officially released album is characterised by a sense of humour which veers from the childish to the clever but stays hilarious. Tracing an arc from the first track, ‘I Don’t Wanna Die’, to the final song’s resignation in ‘Ready to Die’, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone is the sound of a band attempting to speak its own fame into being. Songs like ‘Child Star’ satirise a level of celebrity they hadn’t attained, and ‘I Was Born (A Unicorn)’ acts as a kind of superhero theme-cum-manifesto for the band (even if the two singers presage their eventual split with squabbles over who exactly writes the songs). It’s hard, too, not to read the album as triumphantly and wonderfully queer, from the rainbow on the cover to the band’s white-on-pink outfits and the undeniably queer imagery of ghosts and unicorns. It’s a wonderfully gay album, even if I only discovered it on the horrifyingly heterosexual show How I Met Your Mother.
Song recommendation: ‘I Was Born (A Unicorn)’
Alligator (2005) — The National
Despite Alligator demonstrating their arrival quite clearly, the National somehow became good in secret. Initial responses to Alligator were hardly rapturous, even while it was generally acknowledged as an improvement on their 2001 eponymous debut and their 2003 release Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers. Alligator was, the music press agreed a couple years later once 2007’s Boxer was hailed as a classic on release, a ‘grower’ — an album that no one appreciated enough on the first listen, or even the third, but came to acknowledge as a classic by the time they’d grown familiar with it. In a sense I can see where those critics are coming from: for a band whose sound has become accessible enough for Taylor Swift to repackage many of its elements to wild success, Alligator can be pretty obtuse. It’s not like the National have reinvented the wheel since then: career highlight (at least in terms of critical response) High Violet shares much of Alligator’s DNA — Matt Berninger’s elusive but heartbreaking lyrics, the Dessner twins’ complex, interweaving guitar parts, and Bryan Devendorf’s subtle but confounding drumming. Later albums just refined Alligator’s model, honed it to something precise and immediate. Yet I always find myself with a soft spot for Alligator, its relative looseness and peculiarity adding a warmth and familiarity I just adore. Many of these songs feature Berninger at his most sentimental — in a good way — and emotionally direct, but he’s also a little more willing to slip into characters and attempt bravado. Pitchfork’s review of Boxerclaims that ‘we all pretty much learned how to listen to the National on Alligator’ — but listening to the album, I can’t help but feel like they’re learning to be the National. There’s something lovely about hearing them get there.
Song recommendation: ‘The Geese of Beverly Road’
(check out my piece on the National)
Feels (2005) — Animal Collective
Pinning down one album as illustrative of Animal Collective’s career seems like it’s at best a fool’s errand: their constant stylistic changes and restless experimentation mean that the AnCo you get on any given album is likely to only vaguely resemble their other iterations. For all that, though, there’s a bunch of features present across their discography, and though the resemblance might be vague it’s nevertheless pretty easy to know you’re listening to an AnCo album. The juxtaposition between the voices of Avey Tare — occasionally yelping, always emotive — and Panda Bear — melodic, dreamy — and their complex, interweaving harmonies; a willingness to slip in and out of noise and chaos between pop moments catchier and lighter than almost anything I’ve heard, all balanced by an almost child-like feeling of play; novel combinations of of electronic and acoustic sounds: these are the things that define their music. Feels is part two of the run of four albums in which they did what is — to me, at least — undoubtedly their best work, starting with 2004’s Sung Tongs and culminating in 2009’s absurdly polished Merriweather Post Pavilion. On Feels, they’ve still got one foot in the quasi-freak folk sound of Sung Tongs, but there’s a definite movement towards the poppier, more synth-driven Strawberry Jam and Merriweather. While those latter albums — especially Merriweather — are more polished than Feels, I love the warmth and experimentation and peculiarity that’s particular to this album. It balances pop songs with a vast range of influences — the Beach Boys and even Buddy Holly are notable referents, especially for the more conventionally structured tracks — alongside extended atmospheric meditations.
Song recommendation: ‘The Purple Bottle’
Illinois (2005) — Sufjan Stevens
Maybe it’s not Sufjan’s best album, and certainly it’s uneven, but it’s definitely my favourite. Part two of his abortive ‘fifty states’ project, Illinois — referred to on its cover as Come on feel the Illinoise! — blends community history (and a particular focus on overlooked details) with personal reminiscences, maximalist orchestral overload with acoustic moments of quiet reflection. It always feels like there’s a little too much of it for it to really cohere, but that’s a joy in itself: the feeling that it always tips over the edge of any limits you place on it, becomes something more than the sum of its parts even while its parts threaten to spin off into their own thing. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the contrast between song titles like ‘A Conjunction of Drones Simulating the Way in Which Sufjan Stevens Has an Existential Crisis in the Great Godfrey Maze’ and ‘Chicago’. Somehow it works.
Song recommendation: ‘The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us’
Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? (2007) — of Montreal
of Montreal had, until Hissing Fauna, a general aversion to revealing emotion; they would not be seen dead doing a breakup album. Their habit was escapism, their preferred form the concept album. Yet Hissing Fauna is avowedly and unavoidably a breakup album with a notable emotional transparency, responding to singer Kevin Barnes’ separation from their wife (although by the album’s release they had got back together) and subsequent struggles with his mental health. While its subject matter might be more conventionally associated with compositional spareness, however, Hissing Fauna is a maximalist record filled with apparently joyous synths, propulsive basslines, and absurdly catchy hooks. Its genius is in finding the darkness in its upbeat sounds (which have a tendency to slip into almost crushingly inescapable rhythms) while allowing them to act as something of a counterpoint to the subject matter (occasionally seeming to mock the singer’s despair). Apart from a few moments, most notably during album centrepiece ‘The Past Is a Grotesque Animal’, Barnes refuses to wallow, as if she’s just as compelled by the music as we are.
Song recommendation: ‘A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger’
Bitte Orca (2009) — Dirty Projectors
Dirty Projectors has had quite a journey since Dave Longstreth first used the name to release the hugely experimental Morning Better Last! in 2003. After a few more bizarre solo releases — including 2005’s The Getty Address, a glitch opera concept album about Don Henley — Dirty Projectors moved from individual project to genuine band with 2007’s Rise Above, a reinterpretation of Black Flag’s Damaged, which Longstreth hadn’t listened to for fifteen years. Still determinedly strange, then, but more recognisably rock, and new band member Amber Coffman — also Longstreth’s partner — contributed something new to the project. But then there’s Bitte Orca, a frankly stunning album which is far more accessible and emotionally honest than Dirty Projector’s previous work and incorporates Longstreth’s fascination with a range of genres including R&B, all without missing a beat (at least, unintentionally) in experimentation and innovation. Moments of genuine beauty mix with Longstreth’s intellectual approach to songwriting and referential lyrical style to extraordinary effect, like in ‘Two Doves’, which combines Angel Deradoorian’s gorgeous vocals and a real depth of feeling with complex fingerpicked guitars and a range of lyrical and musical referents including Nico’s version of ‘These Days’. The openness to human connection and collaboration so essential to Bitte Orca is most clearly illustrated by the album’s cover, which returns to a motif from the abstract cover of 2004’s Slaves’ Graves and Ballads — but now centred around Coffman and Deradoorian. This version of Dirty Projectors would eventually split up — after a collaboration with Björk and another staggeringly clever and heartfelt album, 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan — and Longstreth has since released new music as Dirty Projectors, both independently in a self-titled breakup album and with new collaborators for 2018’s Lamp Lit Prose and a collection of recent EPs. But the heart and joy that was found in Bitte Orca is, for me, the band’s pinnacle.
Song recommendation: ‘Stillness Is The Move’
Hospice (2009) — The Antlers
A concept album whose concept is generally opaque, Hospice narrates a hospice worker’s relationship with a patient suffering from bone cancer. While the story appears to represent a real-life abusive relationship in singer Peter Silberman’s life, allegory seems too straightforward a description. There’s a characteristic lushness in the description which accords with a genuine generosity both for the narrator and his lover, as it appears focused not on placing blame but on recovering and moving past trauma. The album has a real coherence to it, tying together into a single whole — even if some individual tracks don’t work too well on their own — and the music swells from minor-key tenderness to a huge sense of scale, but never distracts from the pain of the narrator’s experiences. You can’t help but feel like we’re being invited into and trusted with a narrative with genuine heartbreak and pain at its core.
Song recommendation: ‘Wake’
Hadestown (2010, 2017, 2019) — Anaïs Mitchell, et al.
I have few ways of expressing how much I love Hadestown, which manages to combine a wholly original interpretation of two of the most classic tales around with fantastic songs and an admirably (and surprisingly explicit) anti-capitalist message. Songwriter and concept originator Anaïs Mitchell, with director Rachel Chavkin, has created an astonishing work — or, in a sense, set of works — whose success is owed in large part to their efforts, including in developing a wonderful cast, notable for its diversity both in terms of race and gender and in including voices unlike most you’d expect to find on Broadway. Hadestown started as a song cycle then a concept album by Mitchell, and has since transformed into a full stage musical. You can still check out the album, and there are two cast recordings for the musical: one for its off-Broadway incarnation, substantially elaborated from the original but with a few songs that featured on the original album and/or the musical cut from the release; and one for its Broadway version which includes all songs and a slightly different cast. Most notable, however, are the substantial lyrical changes, with many songs and character arcs essentially transformed between the different releases (though the songs which appeared on the concept album are generally intact) as part of an ongoing process of revision which included intermediary steps between the versions which have seen official release. I love many of the changes, which further develop the musical’s anti-capitalist themes and its increasingly complicated narrative parallels and connections; many others are simply changes in characterisation which offer something different but not necessarily better, while a few cut lyrics or melodies of which I was very fond. If you want to check out Hadestown, the Broadway cast recording is probably the best place to start, but one of the wonderful things about it is how much it’s deepened by looking at previous incarnations of the songs and tracing what’s been gained, what’s been lost, and what’s been developed further. Hearing Hadestown transform from a fascinating concept into a fully realised statement is a genuinely staggering experience.
Song recommendation: ‘Chant’
Have One On Me (2010) — Joanna Newsom
Have One On Me (about which I have already written, in my ‘non-definitive, extremely biased guide’ to Joanna Newsom’s music, so I’ll keep this brief) is a remarkable album; it’s unlike, really, anything else I’ve ever heard. It’s easy, sometimes, to be overwhelmed by its maximalism — the huge number of instruments, the wide range of contrasting musical and lyrical referents, the cover — but it all works and ties together because of the counterweight of the music’s sheer emotionality. She’s got an extraordinarily emotive voice, and hearing her sing about heartbreak and love is enormously affecting. Despite its two-hour playtime, it ties together, too: it’s a concept album, conceptual both in narrative and theme (each track ties together into a story of a love gone wrong) and in approach (she’s described it as her ‘California singer-songwriter’ album, and it clearly comments on music of that style). It’s staggering.
Song recommendation: ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’
Heartland (2010) — Owen Pallett
Owen Pallett has to be one of the most continually creative artists currently recording. Responsible for providing orchestration for a range of work, including Arcade Fire’s Funeral and the Weather Station’s Ignorance, and collaborating with the former band for the gorgeous Her soundtrack, they’re also known for their amazing live shows featuring incredible use of loop pedals to create entirely solo covers — of Caribou’s ‘Odessa’ and Joanna Newsom’s ‘Peach Plum Pear’, for example. Their recorded material, under both their initial moniker ‘Final Fantasy’ and their own name, is reliably fascinating, right down to the D&D-themed He Poos Clouds. Heartland is probably my favourite, however. Where He Poos Clouds was indebted to fantasy in a strictly structural sense (the songs are connected to the eight schools of magic, but generally describe real-life events in fantastical terms), Heartland is set in a fictional world called Spectrum. It tells the story of protagonist and narrator Lewis as he takes on his creator, Owen Pallett. The high concept approach undergirds an album which is really about faith and creation, blending compelling narratives with philosophical meditations, gorgeous and innovative orchestration, and genuinely catchy hooks.
Song recommendation: ‘Lewis Takes Action’
Cosmic Surgery (2011) — Neat Beats
Criminally obscure, Cosmic Surgery is a staggering work of sample-driven experimentation. Neat Beats manages to create tracks with genuine heft and drama from a hugely diverse set of samples, but many of the songs also have a real joyfulness — and sometimes they approach a strange but compelling kind of danceability. Their habit of sampling spoken-word snippets — visible here in recordings of a space launch countdown in opener ‘Graffiti on a Tuesday Night’ and the string of numbers shared between two speakers in ‘...I Miss You so Much (Parts. 1, 2 & 3)’ (which I can mostly sing along with by now) — manages to add something hugely effective despite their allusive referents; this habit is continued onto their next album, Sleep Cycles, which features in ‘The Destroyer of Worlds’ a haunting recording of Oppenheimer discussing nuclear testing. Any album which can combine random numbers with Vashti Bunyan’s staggering voice to good effect is an impressive project; what’s amazing about Cosmic Surgery is that it’s also just a fantastic piece of music.
Song recommendation: ‘I Miss You so Much (Parts. 1, 2 & 3)’
Kaputt (2011) — Destroyer
Another album which has, to my mind, an essentially canonical review, by Ed Comentale at Tiny Mix Tapes, Kaputt is in my opinion one of the last decade’s very best albums. It was accidentally a hit on release — Dan Bejar made a record which felt utterly opposed to any sense of what is fashionable in music, boasting such ill-regarded genres as smooth jazz, but its release inadvertently coincided with a slight renaissance for ‘70s and ‘80s soft rock. As Jayson Greene writes, this meant that Kaputt’s success ended up ‘briefly subjecting Bejar to the indignities of mid-level festival-touring success’. But it’s not just bad timing (though good for any other artist, one imagines) that made Kaputt a success. It’s a perversely gorgeous album, at once, as Comentale puts it, ‘indefensible’ and ‘a masterpiece.’ Where Bejar’s previous records had had a somewhat frantic energy to them, his lyrics a ceaseless progression of ever-shifting referents and images, Kaputt takes a substantially more relaxed, almost meditative approach. It lingers on specific movements and scenes in a way his work hadn’t before, and it’s no surprise to learn that Bejar initially recorded his vocals while lying on a sofa. A standout feature is the presence of singer Sibyl Thrasher, who passed away last year. Her backing vocals for Bejar lend a tunefulness and depth to songs, and act as an almost perfect counterpoint to his laconic style. She underlines one of the album’s real strengths: it has a habit of orchestrating moments in which everything — somehow — comes together in one perfect whole, relentlessly catchy and appealing moments in which Thrasher is almost unavoidably present.
Song recommendation: ‘Suicide Demo for Kara Walker’
(check out my piece on Destroyer)
Gossamer (2012) — Passion Pit
Gossamer is frequently almost painful to listen to, which is odd when you consider that so many of its tracks are so musically upbeat they’re almost (but never quite) saccharine. Michael Angelakos is a consummate manipulator of pop music’s catchiest tricks, and this album is filled with pure sonic joy. While we tend to expect at least a slight confessional element to pop music these days, I know very little which is quite as honest and harsh — particularly about the singer themself. Angelakos reckons with the impact of his struggles on those around him, attempting to process and account for the pain he’s caused, and the record as a whole is vividly personal. While much of the music is gorgeously upbeat, it’s littered with small errors — his voice, especially in his too-common falsetto, has a certain roughness to it; a couple lyrics don’t quite work — which point towards the darker aspects of Gossamer: because we’re seeing him so unvarnished, of course there’ll be the occasional unsophisticated line or forced rhyme.
Song recommendation: ‘Constant Conversations’
Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (2013, 2017) — Dave Malloy, et al.
It’s a hard sell: a sung-through electro-opera adaptation of a portion of War and Peace whose lyrics come directly from translations of the original — and which therefore tend to eschew most lyrical conventions, such as ‘meter’ and ‘rhyme’. Yet for all that, it’s both extraordinarily effective and affecting and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, just really good fun. The music itself is extremely well conceived, shifting effortlessly between moments of orchestral beauty and techno while retaining a distinctly and impressively Russian tinge; the performers, especially Lucas Steele — who brings a compelling and hilarious camp to Anatole — are clearly having the times of their lives; and the handling of the adaptation is at once impressive and oddly funny. In the absence of a narrator, for example, characters frequently provide narration for the actions they’re carrying out — but with a distinctly Tolstoyan voice. Because the events of the musical take place partway through the novel, the ‘Prologue’ consists of a brief runthrough of the central characters and their core personality traits (‘Anatole is hot’) while the chorus reminds us that we’re ‘gonna have to study up a little bit … ‘cause it’s a complicated Russian novel: everyone’s got nine different names’. It’s not just fun, though: there are moments of extraordinary beauty, like ‘Dust & Ashes’, as well as musical experimentation, and the narrative is extremely compelling. Reducing the focus of the musical to only a small section of the novel turns out to have been inspired, because it allows us to get genuinely immersed in these specific stories and emphasises the structural resonances between its different strands. Two cast recordings of the musical exist, but the best is probably the Broadway cast recording, both for its changes to the original and the performances; you can also find footage of the stage show’s impressive choreography quite easily on YouTube.
Song recommendation: ‘Prologue’
Things That Happen At Day // Things That Happen At Night (2013) — milo
Though this technically counts as a pair of EPs, the whole thing coheres into a single project from Rory Ferreira, formerly known as milo and Scallops Hotel but now releasing music as R.A.P. Ferreira (his actual initials). The range of Ferreira’s lyrical creativity is frequently staggering, and the thing which strikes you first is how funny these tracks are. In ‘Folk-Metaphysics, 2nd ed.’, for instance, the lines ‘I’ll buy hallmark cards to tell you you’re heaven-sent / I’ll make sure the envelope colour matches accordingly / I won’t even tell you when you’re boring me’ can’t fail to make me crack a smile; the hallucinogenic narrative of ‘The Otherground Pizza Party’, which also features Open Mike Eagle, is straightforwardly hilarious and I struggle to pick a favourite line (but it’s probably him describing himself as a ‘renowned eater of all things soy bean’). After a while, though, you realise how absurdly clever Ferreira is, weaving in references to childhood obsessions and philosophical works but constantly undercutting them as he thinks through his adulthood. ‘Folk-Metaphysics’, for instance, borrows its title from Schopenhauer’s description of religion, as Ferreira contemplates the lies we tell ourselves, his speaker starting out in the infinitive (‘I'm going to eat a lot more Fig Newtons and sign petitions by women's rights movements’), shifting to his wishes (‘I wish Hegel wasn't so incomprehensible / I wish I was more like the Übermensch’), before resigning himself to his fate (‘In the future I will neuter my ambitions / I will give into anxieties’).
Song recommendation: ‘Folk-Metaphysics’
HOPELESSNESS (2016) — ANOHNI
Developed in collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke, this album from ANOHNI — formerly the singer of Antony and the Johnsons — combines exciting and experimental music with devastatingly honest, politically resonant lyrics. In previous album I Am a Bird Now, for instance, ANOHNI had used chamber pop to grapple with isolation and identity, searching for connection with her collaborators — Lou Reed, Boy George, and Rufus Wainwright feature — and with the world around her, like through the image of Candy Darling on the album’s cover. HOPELESSNESS’s focus remains, frequently, on her astonishing voice, but it has a scale and capaciousness that transcends the personal, marked by the shift to electronic dance music and the embrace of explicitly political themes. These are furiously political tracks, taking in climate change, environmental devastation, American drone attacks, global surveillance programmes, and the failure of Obama to live up to the promise of his campaign, and so many other themes. Throughout, there’s a certain sense of play — an eroticism, a humour — which characterises ANOHNI’s approach, like ‘Watch Me’, which addresses the NSA as ‘Daddy’ (‘I know you love me / ‘cause you’re always watching me’), interrogating themes of voyeurism, intimacy, and the modern surveillance state. It’s fascinating, and almost hilarious until you realise its horror. In ‘Why Did You Separate Me from the Earth’, she laments the loss of connection between humanity and the nature which surrounds us, surveying the environmental wreckage we’ve created. It’s a wonderful message, and you can’t help but feel that ANOHNI is more connected with the world around her than almost anyone else.
Song recommendation: ‘Watch Me’
A Crow Looked at Me (2017) — Mount Eerie
In 2016, Geneviève Castrée, a cartoonist and musician, died of pancreatic cancer, a year after the birth of her first child with her husband, the Microphones and Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum. A Crow Looked at Me is Elverum’s unflinchingly honest, painfully immediate album about the aftermath of her death for both himself and their daughter, written and recorded as he struggled through the months following the loss of Geneviève — and in the room in which she had passed away. Elverum sing-speaks his way through diary-like lyrics, and the music eschews melody and standard structure, and relies on only sparse, unpredictable instrumentation. This all lends a stunning intimacy to the songs, and the album is also fascinating for its suspicion of signification and, really, of art-making in general. The album opens with him asserting that ‘death is real, someone’s there and then they’re not / and it’s not for singing about; it’s not for making into art’. The album’s title represents the ‘uncomfortable feeling of applying significance to insignificant things’, according to Elverum, and he repeatedly undercuts the possibilities of imagery: ‘I can’t remember, were you into Canada geese? / Is it significant, these hundreds on the beach?’ Somehow, though, this gives an almost mystical resonance to the album as a whole, contrasting the obsession with the ‘real’ as Elverum tries to find meaning in something as cruel and pointless as death.
Song recommendation: ‘Real Death’
american dream (2017) — LCD Soundsystem
It would have been so easy for this album to have ruined everything. LCD Soundsystem had had an essentially perfect first run at it: three great albums, a bunch of classics, and a massive, amazing farewell gig (and accompanying concert film) while they were still at the top of their game. Frontman James Murphy had moved onto a bunch of other projects, producing Arcade Fire’s wonderful Reflektor and contributing percussion to (and almost producing, until it fell through) David Bowie’s Blackstar, working with one of his musical heroes. For a band like LCD, so obsessed with the emotional impact of music and with a not-entirely-ironic attachment to the idea of authenticity, of being ‘there’, a comeback album could have seen them turning into just another band full of aging rockers. Except it didn’t. american dream is an amazing album, full of tracks which can rival the highlights of LCD’s discography and with a vividness that was only occasionally glimpsed on previous albums. At their best, LCD were never strangers to emotional intensity, but it all feels that much more lived on american dream, Murphy singing with deeper desperation, passion, and pathos than ever before. Before, his disdain — on tracks like ‘Losing My Edge’ — was always a little tongue-in-cheek, and his mockery was as much for himself as anyone else. On ‘how do you sleep?’, however, his rage at former production partner Tim Goldsworthy is direct and pure. LCD had always worn their influences, particularly from the ‘80s, on their sleeves, but american dream is somehow even more transparent with its references — but it entirely works, and you come to realise that the homages only underline how much this is an album about aging and loss and change.
Song recommendation: ‘american dream’
Ghosteen (2019) — Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Ghosteen is the sound of grief in a way which is unlike almost anything else I’ve ever heard. Nick Cave’s discography is filled with darkness and despair, but it’s never felt quite so close to him; his voice has always had a weight to it which gives depth to the emotions he sings with, but they’ve never felt quite so close to breaking loose of his control. Written in the wake of his son’s death, the album attempts the staggering labour of sorting through the emotional wreckage of that event. The songs eschew traditional structure and the vivid conceits which tend to characterise much of his writing — no murder ballads here — and instead focus on establishing atmosphere and feeling. Instrumentation tends towards drones and strings, and many of the arrangements are lush and gorgeous — but it’s at the moment on the title track when the music drops out and it’s just Cave’s voice on the edge of tears on top of a droning synth that the album is at its most heartbreaking.
Song recommendation: ‘Bright Horses’
Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020) — Fiona Apple
Obviously this album is amazing. I mean, it’s Fiona Apple, for one, and as far as I can tell she’s incapable of making anything that doesn’t inspire some level of awe, even if there might be flaws. And anyway, essentially everyone’s been saying as much. Fetch the Bolt Cutters uses Apple’s by now well-known gifts — her voice’s ability to convey extraordinary depths of emotion, her instinctive sense of complex rhythms, her knack for catchy melodies and amazing pop songs which she then brilliantly ruins just a little with unusual structures and found sounds. Except — while before her songs tended to start from within pop convention before stepping outside it — Fetch the Bolt Cutters feels like it blows music-making apart and starts again from the foundations. Pop forms are out the window; found percussion is now joined by what seems like background noise but really becomes an instrument itself, including the sound of her dogs barking. It’s an intensely personal record, massively direct in its fury, but focuses on issues which reach beyond the individual, most notably in ‘For Her’, which careens between styles as she speaks to the reality of sexual violence. This capaciousness — musical, lyrical, political — gives the album its liberatory strength, pushing back against an unjust and insufficient world.
Song recommendation: ‘Cosmonauts’
Live at Le Guess Who? (2020) — Beverly Glenn-Copeland
This 2018 live performance by Beverly Glenn-Copeland, released last year, is an astonishing record of a musician like basically no other. Much discussion of his work focuses on Glenn-Copeland’s biography more than his music, and honestly I could spend the rest of this summary talking about his life story and how much he deserves the success which has come so late in his life — but I want to focus on the music. It feels like it comes from another world: it’s frequently ethereal and meditative, and defined by his wonderful voice, classically trained and hugely precise but so rich. His band — Indigo Rising, all several generations younger than him — are great, perfectly supporting the songs, even if Glenn-Copeland is the centre of attention. Tracks include many of Glenn-Copeland’s own compositions from throughout his career alongside ‘Deep River’, an African-American spiritual his mother played while he was growing up, but every track is made part of Glenn-Copeland’s unique performance and imbued with a deep warmth. It’s normally frustrating to find a live album with so many and such long ‘Transitions’ between songs, just featuring Glenn-Copeland’s conversations with the audience and his band, but here they bring only joy: he’s so clearly such a wonderful man, so funny and thoughtful and interesting; most of all, though, it’s obvious that he’s enjoying the experience of getting to perform, finally getting to share his music with people who give it the appreciation it has always warranted.
Song recommendation: ‘Ever New’
The Passion Of (2020) — Special Interest
The Passion Of trusts, above all, in the power of punk to articulate a furious, destructive opposition to a political reality which needs reshaping. The New Orleans band Special Interest make music which is absolutely committed to and inseparable from their communities, channeling the legacies of Black and queer music while using punk to refigure them for a contemporary radicalism. The music is aggressive and noisy but deeply compelling, and Alli Logout’s vocals are always shifting between rawness, anger, and tenderness. They sing about the violence of contemporary America — gentrification, policing, poverty — but also imagine a future which is routed through pleasure and desire but affects material change. There’s a real revolutionary potential in The Passion Of, which dreams of ‘the rot of society’ and the ‘joy with autonomy’ which will follow. Beyond the political, though, this music is amazing, catchy and fun and most of all hot. It feels like this is what a future could sound like.
Song recommendation: ‘Street Pulse Beat’
songs (2020) — Adrianne Lenker
Adrianne Lenker is one of those artists who seems incapable of resting. As a solo artist and the principal songwriter of Big Thief, she’s released seven albums since 2016, and while I love her earlier work, it’s clear that throughout that period she’s developed from an extraordinarily gifted musician to a hugely accomplished one. Big Thief’s two 2019 albums, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, are illustrations of this, showcasing her effortless abilities in writing for her band across a range of approaches; most of all, though, they highlight the hugely collaborative nature of Big Thief’s music, driven by the absurd tightness of the band: when they perform live, they typically do so facing one another so they can respond to each other’s performances. On songs and its sister album instrumentals, though, we find Lenker on her own: the tracks were recorded in a one-room cabin in Western Massachusetts to which Lenker had retreated during the pandemic, with just recording engineer Philip Weinrobe and their equipment for company. There’s an immediacy to Lenker’s performance: you feel like you’re in the room with her, and while Big Thief’s tracks feel at their best like the band is echoing and amplifying one another, here there’s no other presence. Her lyrics frequently touch on personal topics, but they’re generally slightly obscured — Two Hands highlight ‘Not’, for example, proceeds exclusively through negation — while on songs, they’re vividly personal, almost confessional. In ‘not a lot, just forever’, she addresses her ex-lover as she sings that ‘your dearest fantasy / is to grow a baby in me / I could be a good mother / and I wanna be your wife’, a startlingly honest and direct lyric for an artist more inclined to elusive imagery than straightforward narration — though the former is still very much present.
Song recommendation: ‘zombie girl’
Ignorance (2021) — The Weather Station
Tamara Lindeman’s songwriting on Ignorance has a knack of cutting to the emotional core, between her sometimes brutally affecting lyrics, her wonderfully rich compositions, and the assured performances of her and her band. There’s a precision to how she builds these songs, and although there’s a huge scale — fourteen musicians are credited — you get the sense that the different elements are only used when necessary, and Lindeman can be found singing over a lone piano just as often as she lets the music take over. Her lyrics blend personal experiences — much of the album is preoccupied with the narrative of a relationship — with wider questions about political obligations and how to exist as part of the world around us. It’s a wonderful record, the best thing I’ve heard this year. If you want to read more words from me on the album, you can check out my post all about it here.
Song recommendation: ‘Tried to Tell You’