2019: Dean's List

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1. Billie Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (Darkroom/Interscope): Slotting this self-created 17-year-old as pop computes musically and commercially while reminding us how amorphous that once snappy term has become. Her soprano too diminutive for vocal calisthenics, her sensibility too impressionistic to bother mapping out track-and-hook bliss points, Eilish is a home-schooled Highland Park weirdo whose darkly playful version of teen-goth angst had already captivated millions of young weirdos-in-potentia before this electro-saturated debut album put in its bid for the rest of us. Seldom catchy in any conventional sense, every one of these 14 tracks entices the ear anyway, from "Bad Guy"'s "duh"s to "Xanny"'s blown speaker cone to the shuddering sound-pit that swallows "You Should See Me in a Crown" to the plinked piano of "All the Good Girls Go to Hell" to the tunefully cooed "Wish You Were Gay," and it keeps going. Only then it closes shut when one of the least self-glorifying suicide songs ever sets up a finale comprising songs titled simply "I Love You" and "Goodbye"--each quiet, each pretty, each what it says, each sad without ever turning gruesome or crossing its fingers. A
2. Todd Snider: Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3 (Aimless): Ten songs, one dedication, and one explanation recorded totally acoustic and almost totally solo, which as the excellent booklet explains doesn't mean tossed off--you'd never know from its offhand feel how practiced this material is. That's one reason it's so replayable without benefit of notable groove or tune. The other, of course, is that the words are good. Having opened with "a song about a song you're working on" ("I mean, it's gone, man. Come on, let it go."), he jam-packs a whole lot of material into "Talking Reality Television Blues," following Milton Berle ("we all had a new escape from the world") with Michael Jackson ("reality killed that video star") with He Who Shall Not Be Namechecked ("Reality killed by a reality star"). "Serving my country under General Malaise," Snider also becomes the first singer-songwriter ever to rhyme "national anthem" with "national tantrum." All in a goofy drawl he didn't learn growing up in Oregon, because he's a Southerner by choice and no goof at all--just another "working fucking schmuck out here standing around waiting to get shot in yet ay-nother tragic addition to an already sorry state of affairs." A
3. Chance the Rapper: The Big Day (self-released): Since the rhyming may seem slack when you follow every word, why bother? As I've determined via the old-fashioned ploy of sticking my (burned) CD in my (overpriced) changer, the opener's choral "we-back" intro and self-sufficient lyric lighten up the room every time they come round, and that mood never dulls. Not one of the crowd of cameos is tossed off. Ben Gibbard reclaims his eternal boyhood, En Vogue relive their lost girlhood, CocoRosie put in their five seconds, two party-pooping, wisdom-dispensing male elders blend sagacity and pomposity with a comic flair dispersed by Randy Newman's disconsolate solace, and Nicki Minaj bids her rap career farewell with the theme outro "It's possible, it's possible/It's possible to me." And the strongest rhymes redound to Chance solo: "Found a Good One" and his half of the Minaj-topped finale. Both celebrate his wedding day with a cred the cameos only flesh out, a cred that will endure as art even if the marriage itself fails--this is showbiz, after all. Best wishes to the happy couple and all their progeny. A
4. Purple Mountains: Purple Mountains (Drag City): "You see, the life I live is sickening/Just spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion," sings the eternally blocked, depressive, and monotonal David Berman 11 years after his final album with/as the Silver Jews. Yet he sounds sprightlier--the tempos quickened slightly, the tunes turned fetching, the jokes softened. "I Loved Being My Mother's Son" breathes a warmth, devotion, and detail truly corny songs never risk, and if his significant other is making friends while he's acting stranger, she obviously has a right. Even "Margaritas at the Mall" has the spiritual grace to blame those boozy not-actually-happy hours on a God who's a lot more "subtle" than he or she has any right to be. You tell him or her, David. Only then the man goes and kills himself. A
5. Carsie Blanton: Buck Up (Carsie Blanton): The unfashionably chirpy, unabashedly horny Blanton has been making albums since 2005. This one, which credits some 400 "executive producers," is easily the best--she's never been so catchy or sexy, and along with unabashed politics catchy and sexy are her flash points. The sure shot "Jacket" strikes a balance--"I like your shirt, I like your jacket/I like to think about you when I whack it" meets "We tried to have a chat, but it was too scary/You're just a Democrat, I'm a revolutionary"; the both-sides-now "Harbor" turns "Love was made for making" into "Hearts were made for breaking." "That Boy" is all lust, "American Kid" all history lesson. And then there's depression: "Bed" can't be a sex song until she stands on her own two feet nor "Battle" a politics song until she makes it through the night. So on the finale her hound dog puts first things first: "Buck up baby, cmon sic 'em/Make 'em laugh if you can't lick 'em." Which sums up her philosophy if anything does. A
6. Kim Gordon: No Home Record (Matador): Pre- or post-breakup, Gordon's non-Sonic Youth music has always indulged her avant-garde commitments and pretensions. Tossing off punky jingles or slathering on the noise, she's honored the dada-derived throwaway, "experimental" in the sense of an aesthetic conjecture no one will miss if it leads nowhere. This is very different--its unfinished sound further enriches a musical goal Gordon and producer-collaborator Justin Raisen clearly labored to get right. A few plays in, consigned by surgery to a portable sound system, I concluded that I wouldn't hear the album for what it was till I was back in my office with some real speakers, and though I'd enjoyed and admired it before, I was right. The guitars credited throughout meld with the electronics that dominate in a rough but also eloquently textured construct that complements the fragility and directness of Gordon's sometimes pained, sometimes whispery vocals. Definitely there are verbal coups here--"Air BnB"'s skeptical post-hedonism, "Earthquake"'s "sand in my heart for you." But you'll come back for the sounds. A
7. Danny Brown: uknowwhatimsayin? (Warp): Although the 38-year-old ex-dealer and ex-con's first album since 2016 clocks in at 10 tracks in 31 minutes, to me it feels major as it puts its stamp on the verities of a hip-hop I've treasured since the year he was born: voice, verbiage, beats. Brown's nonstop flow is unique yet in the tradition, distilling his comic, caustic Detroit drawl into something suitable for streetwise tale-spinning and both-sides-now truth-telling alike. His lyrics are undiminished from "Stand-up niggas taking shots to the knees" and "Boarded-up houses in between lie the killing fields" to "Mixin' Ripple listening to Minnie Riperton" and "Got more pills than the Olsen twins." And from Q-Tip and JPEGMafia to 10cc and Ota Petrina and oops here's Yoko Ono too, the music never stands still. A
8. Sonic Youth: Battery Park, NYC: July 4th 2008 (Matador): Having enjoyed this free concert at a well-shaded distance, I'd best attest that my rave can't be nostalgia because this is more intense than what I remember. Played back to back with 1989's Daydream Nation, which provides half its 10 titles, or the live Daydream Nation pieced together for the 2007 "Deluxe Edition," it holds its own--the guitars sharper, more abrasive, higher in pitch. No doubt newish bassist Mark Ibold enhances this effect by relieving Thurston and Lee of the need to augment his low end as they sometimes did with Kim on bass--which in turn may well free her to dominate vocally even more than she did before. Knowing the bitter breakup that already lies in wait for this great band, it's fitting that the cover photo depicts Kim singing alone and up front. This was her record. A
9. Kalie Shorr: Open Book (Kalie Shorr): A Nashville Song Suffragette from Portland and I mean Maine, Shorr is yet another smart young woman who might once have been a sharp-tongued folkie but knows Nashville is where that way of music still has a life worth living. This Pistol Annies tryout isn't "Americana," though I hope she's too market-wise to admit it. Nor is it the strophic significance-mongering now on the rise from Jessica Pratt's deliberate quietude to Cate Le Bon's arch gentility to Aldous Harding's retiring obscurantism. Shorr avoids playing her smallish voice cute except maybe when buttering up that blue-eyed honey in L.A. who she'll never forget the way she forgot his name. From "Everybody needs an escape and mine was leaving" to "I've been taking advice from my vices," she's a woman with more killer lines than are good for her. But she's so set on self-knowledge that she attaches them to a broken home on the poor side of town, a sister who ODs, and her "weird relationship" with her dad. She's never more indelible than when she's all "F U Forever." But she sings her last words as an "Angry Butterfly": "And when I clawed my way out/I was changed, I was changed." A
10. The Paranoid Style: A Goddamn Impossible Way of Life (Bar/None): Elizabeth Nelson is a fine rock critic (Lawyers, Guns and Money, Oxford American, terse jabs and judgments on Twitter) leading an able rock group, and fuck me if these aren't both side jobs insofar as they pay anything at all--she makes her living as a literacy consultant for an educational nonprofit. So as a bandleader she's earned . . . not royalties, get real, but the right to write one that adds a parenthetical "(Economy)" to the dreamy Neil Young title "Expecting to Fly." Beyond "Turpitude," as the opener is called, every unmistakably enunciated word here is known to most Americans, which doesn't mean many of them will get the jokes--my favorite: "I learned to smoke from the Contract With America/I learned to smoke from Pulp Fiction/I learned to smoke from Mojo Nixon." Squeezing 11 songs into half an hour, her voice relaxes enough to make them a pleasure. I don't get all the jokes either--as a dual citizen, Nelson understands more about Irish history and politics than I ever will. But I do know a lot about Alan Greenspan and They Might Be Giants, whose songs establish that Nelson knows more. Every catchy number is marked by linguistic specifics, and the title tune is a rock-biz masterpiece. Subject: 11 dead at a Who concert in Cincinnati, 1979. A
11. Bruce Springsteen: Springsteen on Broadway (Columbia '18): Always averse to shelling out major bucks for a Broadway show, me and my gal were happy to catch this one on Netflix--in two sittings, true, but when I streamed the audio version a month or two later I found myself listening with minimal zone-out for two-and-a-half hours straight. So I bought the budget-priced double CD, and though it was a while before I felt like sticking disc one in the changer, just a few minutes passed before I added disc two and listened through yet again. Never big on extended spoken-word material or solo-acoustic remakes of exalted songbooks, I'm impressed. The Springsteen this most recalls isn't like any earlier album but the 2016 autobiography he called Born to Run for better reasons than you might imagine. Like that fast-reading 508-pager, its aim is to simultaneously depict and demythologize the Jersey shore and poke major holes in an authenticity it reconceives at a truer level of complexity--on his first cross-country car trip, the guy who would soon write "Racing in the Street" had to learn to drive from scratch when the guy who was supposed to ride shotgun disappeared in Tennessee. Like the book, this ends where it begins--at the huge old copper beech tree that anchored his childhood, except that since he last visited the county has cut it to the street. Springsteen being Springsteen, he swears "some essential piece of it was still there"--and being Springsteen, convinces you that that's his truth even if it isn't your kind of thing. A
12. Salif Keita: Un Autre Blanc (Believe/Naive): Keita, who turns 70 in August, hasn't released an album since 2010 and may never make another. But his voice remains a startling thing, and this grabbed me the moment he launched a wordless shout through a female chorus half a minute in. Then he kept it up for an hour--warm here, intense there, surprisingly mellow for his age whether gruff or sweet. Beyond the ongoing miracle that is Youssou N'Dour, I haven't heard a West African vocal showcase to compare since Keita's own 1999 album Papa, and this is better. "Were Were" is designed to grab you as it did me, and two other standouts feature guests--Angelique Kidjo adding sugar to "Itarafo," where Parisian rapper MHD also takes a verse, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo doing what comes with practice practice practice on the blatantly AutoTuned "Ngamale." But that ain't all--not a track falters. So what got him going? Although a title that translates "another white" indicates that he's speaking out for his fellow albinos, still oppressed as freaks or worse in many African cultures, the lyrics his label sent me are standard sincere African humanism. I'm not even sure how many songs are in Bambara and how many in French. But I am sure that relistening in pursuit of this riddle has been no burden. A-
13. Stella Donnelly: Beware of the Dogs (Secretly Canadian): In plain English and unassuming soprano, a musical encyclopedia of assholes, all male not just because she's female but because assholes generally are. Yes there are full-on predators--the rich prick with his dick out and the boy-will-be-boy who knows why she wears her shirt so low oh yes he does. But most are more ordinary--the intimidator, the reckless driver, the coke-snorter, the one-percenter, the big shot wishing she'd drop the attitude, the lunch date gabbing about himself, the feckless no-show, the guy who was never home enough, the guy she did her best to love, the guy whose baby she doesn't want, the guy she misses even now. Some ladies do actually love outlaws, and too often they get what they put in for. But most women are just looking for an interesting man who'll respect her and stick around. These do exist in some quantity, I believe. But as it is written, they can be hard to find. A-
14. Big Thief: Two Hands (4AD): Spare and a touch awkward, short on hook and groove without disrespecting melody or beat, Big Thief prove intensely listenable nonetheless if you give them a chance-and-a-half. Adrianne Lenker's slight, nearly childlike voice is never cute; she emotes with the subtle strength and considered precision of a Berklee scholarship student and avoids the strophic songpoetry now making its latest comeback. On the band's second 2019 album she tends forthright, doing a solid for loyal guitar-bass-drums bandmates with no discernible folk-rock in them. And then--unexpectedly, after six reflective songs--erupts the prematurely climactic six-minute "Not," which tops off its line-by-line catalogue of homely details and existential insufficiencies with a two-guitar freakout that just might blow you away. Listen up, black midi. (Bet they already have.) A-
15. 75 Dollar Bill: I Was Real (Glitterbeat/Tak:til): On 2016, 2017, and 2018 sessions in three studios in Brooklyn and one in Knoxville, guitarist Che Chen and percussionist Rick Brown's avant-rock duo-plus improve on 2016's fine little Wood / Metal / Plastic / Pattern. The handsome CD packaging establishes that digital whiz Brown's main ax remains "plywood crate," that "quarter-tone guitar" is the most prominent of Chen's seven instruments, and that no one else appears on even half the nine tracks, though electric bassist Sue Garner and contrabassist Andrew Lafkas come close. Vocals: zero, not a wheeze or a grunt. Tunes: compelling because they're so strange and microtonal. Mood: meditative and excitable in tandem and sometimes simultaneously, immersive when loud yet never fully trancelike. It's been said by me and others that there's a lot of northwest Africa in this music even though Chen's schooling there was brief, so I'll point out that three titles reference a Mauritanian wedding-dance genre. The liveliest is the four-minute "WZN4." If you're curious you might start there. A-
16. Harriet Tubman: The Terror End of Beauty (Sunnyside '18): Inexhaustible bassist Melvin Gibbs, the fulcrum of this long active, not much recorded trio, has been a jazz-rock rock since Sonny Sharrock schooled him and vice versa in the '80s. But this album is defined by guitarist Brandon Ross, who's not quite Sharrock but has every right to cite Jack Johnson/John McLaughlin-period Miles Davis as its model--more than he would, in fact, with the group's 2017 Araminta, which featured trumpet legend Wadada Leo Smith. The many highlights are all different--diddleybeat opener "Farther Unknown," rhythm-shifting "The Green Book Blues," dubwise-plus "Five Points," painfully distorted reading of "Redemption Song." Less galvanic than McLaughlin, Ross is richer and fuller to compensate, as on "3000 Worlds," which builds from the barely audible clatter of not actually random percussion to a stately and even leisurely guitar homily that's not so much driven as adorned by bass and drums laying down contrapuntal patterns of their own. A-
17. black midi: Schlagenheim (Rough Trade): This young g-g-b-d is such a sensation in Britain its reviews there read like competing thesis abstracts, and while all the talk of math-rock, King Crimson, and Japanese genres I've never heard of might discourage a geezer like me from applying his magnifying glass to the lyric booklet, he'd already Spotified their album in the wake of a good-humored Pitchfork rave and was reminded of Pavement and 75 Dollar Bill. The drummer is the virtuoso, the bassist the rock, the unmatched guitars the sound, and singer Geordie Greep . . . well, as Pitchfork guy Jeremy D. Larson put it: "Imagine someone with the name 'Geordie Greep' and that's exactly what he sounds like." On their hysterical breakthrough "bmbmbm," Greep deploys his unhinged upper register to repeat variants on the phrase "She moves with a purpossse" until you're ready for a closer that ends with the Polish words for please, thank you, and goodbye. Message: Brexit lurks. A-
18. Tanya Tagaq: Toothsayer (Six Shooter): On a widely streamable not-(yet?)-for-sale EP commissioned to add aural buzz to the British National Maritime Museum's "Polar Worlds" exhibit, the throat-singing Inuk avant-gardist assumes all vocal and compositional responsibilities. No hip-hop, no Nirvana covers, not even any male-sounding shamanistic croaks--the closest analogy is Fluxus-period Yoko Ono with the disruptive techniques referencing content more concrete, organic, and political than shock for education's sake or existential despair. We can hear this because we know how urgently Tagaq cares about both global warming and indigenous peoples. For half an hour she emits dozens of nonverbal sounds well beyond croons and screams--squeaks, belches, agonized gutturals, many more. This is music that mourns the end of the world. She wants it to disturb us, and it should. A-
19. The Delines: The Imperial (Decor/El Cortez): As is clearer in the novels he's said are more "easygoing" than his music--particularly Lean On Pete, the movie version of which earned raves last year--Willy Vlautin's songs aren't dark because he thinks dark is cool or mistakes his own depressive tendencies for existential truth. Instead, the forlorn, mumbly affect of his signature band, Richmond Fontaine, is attributable more to his vocal limitations than to his philosophy of life. That's why he recruited Amy Boone to front the Delines. In both bands Vlautin finds pathos and dignity in sub-working class stragglers who drink too much and fall out of love when the money's gone. But Boone sings so thoughtful and caring that you feel the strength as well as the pain of the wronged women whose stories Vlautin has her tell--the escapee from Felony Flats and the lover fixing to buy her guy a new coat from Arlene's as well as Holly the Hustle stuck with a handicapper twice her age and Polly giving it one more try a day after Eddie busted her in the face. Deepest of all is the lead "Cheer Up Charley," which doesn't mean Charley should go get stoned. It means that if he uses up all his vacation days he'll lose that "job on the docks" he'll never beat, and then what? "There ain't no end to going down / There ain't no end / So cheer up Charley." A-
20. Chai: Punk (Burger): Proudly "new-cute" and post-if-not-quasi J-pop, Mana, Kana, Yuki, and Yuna play k, g, b, and d respectively. On their second album, they beef up the high-soprano chants of their 2017 Pink with hard beats that turn march-like occasionally. They also decorate their lyrics with stray bits of English. "Choose go!" "Don't kidding me." "What a cute girl I am! What a cute girl you are!" "Do you do housework? It's a great job! [Chortle chortle chortle chortle]." Replete with bite and body yet so light it might blow away like a puffball in a summer breeze, it's super simple yet unprecedented in its tiny way. Grab it now. It'll still be there when you open your hand--I promise. A-
21. Lee "Scratch" Perry: Rainford (On-U Sound): Riddled with reissues, collaborations, bootlegs, remixes, and of course dubs, the Upsetter's catalogue is beyond comprehension. Post 2011, when he turned 75, Wikipedia lists 13 albums while omitting more titles than I'm mad enough to compare-and-contrast from Spotify's offerings; upsetter.net credits 30 undated albums to "Lee Perry" and 12 more to "Lee Perry &"; etc. But if you care about the greatest of the dubmasters, this project, overseen for the 84-year-old by great white dubmaster Adrian Sherwood, is an album that holds together. Is there a single track as head-turning as, to name a few personal faves, "I Am a Psychiatrist," "Messy Appartment," or "Poop Song"? Definitely the "Autobiography of the Upsetter" finale, possibly the "Cricket on the Moon" opener, but in the end it doesn't matter, because all nine tracks achieve both solidity and differentiation--sound good without sounding too much like any of the others. Take a wild guess and thank Sherwood, whose 1983 African Head Charge release Drastic Season has won my ears and heart as I've done my due diligence. I'll never know where this album stands or sprawls in Perry's oeuvre, But I do know that it will now replace 2004's Panic in Babylon as my go-to Upsetter. A-
22. The Ex: 27 Passports (Ex '18): Compared at various junctures to both the Crass and Einstürzende Neubauten, these vintage-1979 quasi-anarchist Dutch Anglophones have released dozens of albums I've never heard, so to compensate I power-streamed their 2009 30 compilation and concluded that while industrial and "world" sonics do both emerge, the band's enduring fondness for the strummed drone evokes nothing as much as the Fall without Mark E. Smith--that is, a Fall who aren't the Fall at all. I also concluded that Arnold de Boer's leads on his first true album rail and nag more irksomely than the raggedier ones of 30-year-man G.W. Sok used to, and that I prefer this unrelenting hour of protest music to any I could assemble from their best-of. Launched by flag-wavers where cities that modernize together drown together and the rod demolishes every human body part except the heart, they proceed through a car crash that isn't the car's fault, a hard drive sunk in the sea, words without referents, time out of mind, change pursuing its own logic, the feces of the rich, and four billion tulip bulbs. Am I claiming these songs make more sense taken together? To the extent that anything does, yes. A-
23. that dog.: Old LP (UME): Two decades on, Anna Waronker's band sound as fresh and tuneful as they did in their twenties. With melodies on their way from catchy to exquisite, it's alt-rock primarily by historical association--far from obtruding, the many chamber-string parts complete a sonic concept you always sensed was there. Though the hyperconscious lyrics often seem constricted, resentful, unresolved, the music lifts them up, and then the the title finale lifts the whole album up. Having vaguely expected a fond joke about Waronker and bandmate Rachel Haden's deep vinyl-era roots--Anna's dad Lenny Waronker, son of Liberty Records founder Simon Waronker, produced Arlo Guthrie, Ry Cooder, Little Feat, Rufus Wainwright, and his lifelong friend Randy Newman--I was instead bowled over by a devotional tribute to the power of recorded music to allay mortality. "I can hear you breathe," the pushing-50 Waronker sings to Rachel Haden's departed father, bass giant Charlie Haden. "I can see you right in front of me." For those few minutes, her mixed feelings go to heaven and the whole album seems to follow. A-
24. Tyler Childers: Country Squire (RCA/Hickman Holler): This guy can write. For the second straight album, he mixes a few sure-shot classics into nine straight winners--imaginatively observed, acutely colloquial songs of the Appalachian life, the musician's lot, or both. On 2017's Purgatory I loved the way he pivoted off the title into the doctrinal matters that still persist where fundamentalism rules, for the object of his special affection is a papist so unbiblical as to believe there's a place between heaven and hell. Here he's apparently married this infidel, a paragon who texted him the selfies that inspire the juiciest wanking song in the literature--"It gets so hard out on the road," so thank the Lord the motel has his "favorite lotion" and his "Ever Lovin' Hand." Other topics include the muse he can't refuse, the '66 camper he's customizing, a school bus driver who'll paddle your ass, and the high price of peace of mind. A-
25. Leyla McCalla: Capitalist Blues (PIAS America): As with fellow Carolina Chocolate Drop Rhiannon Giddens, McCalla has tended mannered--like the trained cellist she is, so committed to her skill set she has little feel for more naturalistic conventions. But here, shoring up the overt politics I came in cheering for, she's not only more relaxed vocally but gets true band feel out of shifting personnel anchored by drummer Chris Davis and bassist-guitarist Jimmy Horn. Sure she ranges around--"Lavi Vye Neg" miniaturizes Coupé Cloué's compas groove, "Oh My Love" is a zydeco. But there's a wholeness to this music that suits an ideological purpose saturated with but not overpowered by economic oppression. Crucially, these songs make a point not just of privation proper but of worry and insecurity--including "Aleppo," which begins "Bombs are falling/In the name of peace" and then describes the everyday wretchedness of the lives still braving the ruins. A-
26. Sleater-Kinney: The Center Won't Hold (Mom + Pop): It took me more than a month and well over a dozen plays to finally hear this album as the extreme break Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker embrace and Janet Weiss wants out of. Misled by my mistrust of producer St. Vincent's polished professionalism and plain old art-rock, I was also put off--yet impressed as well--by the industrial drumbeat/cowbell that announces the title opener and then repeats every two seconds for the first two minutes of its three. But eventually I noticed myself perking up every time the CD began, because this wasn't just a hook but a grabby one--the grabbiest on an album that gives it competition straight through to the end. Though journalistic toilers seeking refuge from pop divadom may resent the album's musical efficiency, I find it meatier than either Charly Bliss or Taylor Swift, and those are records I like a lot. Moreover, it has politics from its Yeatsian opener to a closer that invokes both #MeToo and Hillary '16 if you want it to, plus "Hurry on Home" evokes an abusive husband as well as an abusive system whether Brownstein thinks so or not. Ah the elusive allusiveness of the hooky pop song. A-
27. Jeffrey Lewis & the Voltage: Bad Wiring (Don Giovanni): Lewis's folk-rock has the usual musical limitations: strophic and strummed, it proceeds in a straight line with scarcely a bridge to the final iteration of a chorus catchier than the verse, with Lewis's nagging East Village sprechgesang fusing built-in sarcasm with earned yearning. But half the verses proceed so hummably you could call them catchy, which gives the album room to let the rest sink in at a more leisurely pace. The "And about our relationship" refrain of "My Girlfriend Doesn't Worry" will have you replaying the album instantly, the better to shake hands with the tragic alt-everything takeoff "Exactly What Nobody Wanted" and the pre-vinyl-revival "LPs," followed next time by "Except for the Fact That It Isn't" and "Dogs of My Neighborhood." And eventually you'll realize that the statement of principle here is "Take It for Granted," a cliche Lewis has learned to appreciate. In this frightening time, he's old enough to have figured out that the shock of the new isn't always an up while something that'll be there next time can be. And in this vinyl-reviving time he's packaged the CD with a cartoonist's art-directed intricacy that mere downloaders would never guess was there without me kvelling about it. A-
28. Alex Chilton: From Memphis to New Orleans (Bar/None): A cranky and eclectic guy of limited stick-to-itiveness, the teen Box Top and ironic Big Star's signature format as a solo artist was the EP. His great album post-Big Star, mostly recorded after he left his native Memphis for New Orleans in 1982, is the 19-track 1991 Rhino compilation 19 Years, dominated by but hardly limited to obsessive, off-kilter, achingly fragile sex/love songs with titles like "Kanga Roo," "Bangkok," and "Holocaust." Yet 28 years later Bar/None's alt-pop major domo Glenn Morrow has assembled a terrific 15-track comp that duplicates only five of Rhino's, none of which you'll mind hearing twice--in particular the supernally sardonic 1986 AIDS song "No Sex" and the supernally tender 1987 love/sex song "A Thing for You." Morrow highlights the pop polymath who loved Carla Thomas's "B-A-B-Y," Skeeter Davis's "Let Me Get Close to You," and Ronny & the Daytonas' "GTO." But he's also proud to preserve for CD posterity the lifelong radical's "Guantanamerika" ("Breathing in the mist of the crop duster/Gazing at the stars that have lost their luster") and "Underclass" ("I oughta go to work but I'm not gonna do it"). A-
29. Ezra Furman: Twelve Nudes (Bella Union): At 33, wandering Jew and transgender seeker Furman erupts into 11 punk rants in 27 minutes because she's always had an album like this in him and somebody had to do one quick: "Working people are killing themselves to get by, and they're working for billionaires," s/he's said. With the world in worse shape than at any time since I was smart enough to notice, I don't know why there aren't many more such, though they'd probably be cruder than this--today's few explicitly political punks favor a metal macho Furman has no heart for. Instead, the scratchy, screeched tunes grow on you, and there's enormous variety to lyrics that don't always equate political awareness with rage or certainty and can even be droll--try not only "I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend" but "My Teeth Hurt." Inspirational Facebook comment: "Something is wrong; everybody knows it; this is not the century we wanted." A-
30. Lizzo: Cuz I Love You (Atlantic/Nice Life): Bigging up via an exuberantly overstated intensity that doesn't quit when the tempo eases and only slows to a creep for some erotica that gets loud at a climax worthy of the name, this long-running hopeful makes good on an iconicity worthy of her casual pride and skilled transition from rapper to singer. She's so talented it's hard to believe it took her till 31 to get the job done until you consider how many doubts and fears she must have faced down first. Part of the way she enacts her pride is to pretend it comes effortlessly, as is her right. But you can be sure she has some confessionals in store. A-
31. Diabel Cissokho: Rhythm of the Griot (Kafou Music): Inheritor of a centuries-old griot tradition and son of a renowned kora player who died of tuberculosis in 2003, this Damon Albarn protege with homes in both Cornwall and Senegal is a mellow-voiced kora master who's been releasing solid albums under his own name for a decade. But this latest one, underwritten by the do-gooding wets of Arts Council England, is the sharpest and most interactive by a noticeable margin. Pace and flow are smooth and thoughtful; individual tracks turn successively clear, spry, warm, traditional, solicitous, playful, ritualistic, virtuosic. An exceptional piece of album-making. A-
32. Miranda Lambert: Wildcard (RCA): The first nine seconds of "Too Pretty for Prison," wherein Miranda and her pal Maren decide not to snip his brake linings or antifreeze his Gatorade because orange isn't their color, deploy guitar-bass-drums suitable for climaxing a Motley Crue ballad--and for reminding Luke Combs et al. that Lambert has been outrocking the penis-packing "country" competition since her 2005 "Kerosene." In a Nashville where steel guitars are as vestigial as Harlan Howard covers, she's a rawer version of Tom Petty with more help on the songwriting (Luke Dick-Natalie Hemby snag five cowrites, Lindsey-McKenna-Rose four). Hence all the songs stand up in a row, and this still being Nashville--not only was it recorded there, the onetime Oklahoman now shares a nearby mansion with the NYC cop she just married--the metaphor bank has a ring that's more like a twang. She's got an Airstream to go with her new truck, "It All Comes Out in the Wash" recommends the spin cycle, and "White Trash" catalogues upscale versions of the real thing from a Cadillac on cinder blocks to dog hairs on the Restoration Hardware. Like she says: "Pretty bitchin'." A-
33. Craig Finn: I Need a New War (Partisan): As Finn has aged, so have his protagonists. All 10 of these are tired, their escapes meager and their day-to-days dull and depressing; only one "had a kid and all the rest" and only one is in a relationship; most struggle or worse economically, grinding their way through shit jobs if they have jobs at all; even when they're middle class they don't enjoy it. Is it really that bad out there, statistically? Not quite. But with his singing reflective and his arrangements relaxed, Finn's compassion for these lost souls is educational and exemplary. My favorites include the hapless hopeful who wants to blow an insurance payout on a trip to the mountains that'll give Joanie "something to hope for," the pilgrim who manages to search out his ex-wife waitressing in St. Paul before the numbers the doc found in his chest finish him off, and the bank clerk who leaves a 20 on the kitchen counter for the well-meaning loser she wishes she could lift from his misery. Beneath the 20 is a message for sufferers everywhere: "Have a decent day." A-
34. Charly Bliss: Young Enough (Barsuk): It's been a while since a new power-pop machine has operated at this pitch of tuneful intensity. Eva Hendricks never lets her breathy childishness undercut her determined professionalism, and she doesn't live in a catchy bubble--the lead "Blown to Bits" catalogs satisfactions, distractions, and incidentals ripe for extinction in a world where an unnamed "he," as "Bleach" puts it, "could destroy everything that I like." Still, something about these songs feels pat, even unempathetic sometimes. Beneath their punk-informed momentum and textured-chrome surface are self-realization precepts about believing in who you are and accepting your own insecurities that mean more to well-fixed postcollegiates still figuring shit out than to those all too preoccupied with earning a living. These are legitimate power-pop themes. But spiritually they only take you so far. A-
35. Little Simz: Grey Area (Age 101): After two valiant, well-crafted, less than compelling albums, what struck me instantly about this London-born-and-based Nigerian rapper's third try was its musicality: soft-edged without slurring a word, her flow is ductile and refreshing, brooklike whether or not she's ever tromped in the woods. Yet it's also confident and even defiant without benefit of dancehall boom-bap. Peeved that she's got a career but not much more, the hard-touring 25-year old insists that she's a rapper, not merely a female rapper. And that's fine. But whether reporting that she's "a sensitive soul" or protesting that her jailed friend Ken has "a heart full of gold/Good intent with a smile so big," her virtues are female virtues even if they should be everyone's. How many males would begin a song claiming "L-O-V-E" is "something that I don't believe in" and end it "Was bound to end eventually/Still it hurts tremendously/Can't bear the intensity"? Not many--other males might mock them! Simz is clearly tough--has to be. But she's also clearly kind, and that's even tougher. A-
36. Ariana Grande: Sweetener (Republic '18): Since my secondhand teenpop fandom dried up well before my daughter's enthusiasms dwindled down to One Direction, I ignored Grande until a mixed phalanx of market analysts and poptimist diehards declared this 2018 album pure pop for track-and-hook people. This consensus motivated me to replicate saturation airplay my way--shelling out for the CD and sticking it in the changer until I was ready to cry uncle. A similar ploy got me nowhere with One Direction, their albums so bland I quickly forgot they existed. But Grande is pleasant in such a physically uncommon and technically astute way. Her pure, precise soprano is warm without burr or melisma, its mellow sweetness never saccharine or showy as it strolls through a front-loaded garden of sonic delights where Nicki Minaj outgrowls Missy Elliott and Pharrell Williams's inventions are more subtle yet also more thrilling than Max Martin's. And as she shares self-healing advisories like "No Tears Left to Cry," "Get Well Soon," and especially "Breathin" with all the fans who lived through her terrorized 2017 Manchester concert, you never doubt that the details of the healing are sharpened by own earned traumas. A-
37. Rapsody: Eve (Jamla/Roc Nation): Because excessive solemnity is woke music's cardinal sin, I wish "Serena" came up earlier than track six, because by then I was craving a hook I couldn't get enough of, plus this one is lifted from Miami's Dr. Luke, of censored, sexist "Me So Horny" renown. It's so reassuring to hear this staunchly political North Carolinian 36-year-old embrace those particular Southern roots, helping me relish as well as admire her tireless rhyming: "Tommy Boy" to "tomboy," "mothership" to "other shit," "anime" to "Anna Mae" (Bullock, look it up), and it don't stop. With every track named after a black heroine--the part of Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Hatshepsut is played by who other than Queen Latifah--Rapsody keeps the knowledge coming. Representing for the brothers is who else but J. Cole. And for that Marianne Williamson touch here's L.A. "self-love" advocate Reyna Biddy. A-
38. The National: I Am Easy to Find (4AD): I was pleased and surprised to enjoy the 23-minute YouTube-available Mike Mills film of the same name, a kind, imagistic birth-to-death biography of a white middle-class working mother that's intertwined somehow with the making of the band's eighth album. But the film has only one explicit connection to the album that occasionally pokes through its surface: it's about a woman. Hence women often make themselves heard, and their voices transform how the music sounds, feels, and signifies. Matt Berninger's love/relationship songs have often had some tenderness to them, and he's gotten more relaxed about it over the years. But here almost every track is open to substantive female input on a musical whole that feels consistently interactive and empathetic and also not so glum--even when you can't pin down exact meanings, it makes love sound possible. Inconveniently, the almost entirely female "So Far So Fast" is the one track that goes nowhere, and for 6:37 at that. Then again, "Not in Kansas," the 6:45 autobiography-with-(female)-Greek chorus just before it, evokes the bicoastal diaspora with a regret so sharp and indelible it feels tragic--and is. A-
39. Guy Clark: The Best of the Dualtone Years (Dualtone '17): Spurred by Steve Earle's stopgap tribute album to finally get a bead on this Texas-to-Nashville Americana legend/totem, a manifestly good guy who died at 74 in 2016, I was surprised to end up plighting my troth with this scant, late double-CD, 19 tracks including five deal-making live oldies and three unusually solid "unreleased writer demos." As indicated below, the RCA best-of falls off fast after a wham-bam start, and the most likely-looking of the Spotify playlists ignores the morning-after "Instant Coffee Blues," which along with the after-midnight "Out in the Parkin' Lot" stands as Clark's best song not counting "Homegrown Tomatoes." Although the young Clark sang better than Earle ever has, by his Dualtone sixties he was getting by on savvy and charm, which suffice. The live "L.A. Freeway" tacks on a story about his landlord that reminds me of how ready I was to leave my own North Hollywood garage apartment in 1971, four years before I ever heard of Guy Clark. Like a lot of this record, it makes me sorrier he's gone. A-
40. Youssou Ndour: History (Naïve/Believe): Between 1999 and 2010, Nonesuch backed four superb N'Dour studio albums and a worthy live recap, but then his discography got hard to track: seven albums/EPs by my count, the three Senegal-mainlys markedly superior to the Euro-American crossover bids. As sheer output, this speaks well of a mbalax tycoon and sometime pol who'll turn 60 in October. But the international product isn't up to Nonesuch standards--too eager to please for such a titan. This one, on the French indie that just backed Salif Keita's first album in nine years, is shrewder. It's a ballad album--there are tama drums, sure, but none of the hectic clatter that's riled up long-legged male Senegalese dancers everywhere I've seen N'Dour except Carnegie Hall. N'Dour's voice is barely diminished, a slight burr detectable here and there. But he has the grace to share leads on four of 10 tracks: two sampled from long-gone, rough-voiced Afro-crossover pioneer Babatunde Olatungi, another by Swedish-Nigerian youngblood Mohombi, and best in show Swedish-Gambian Seinabo Sey's transformation of N'Dour's historical "Birima" into a contemporary pride song of her own. Nor is that the only N'Dour standard reimagined here. The man has world tour to crush. He's got his head up and he's not screwing around. A-
41. Rachid Taha: Je Suis Africain (Naïve/Believe): Taha was working on this album when he died six days short of his 60th birthday in 2018, and it's not his best. But for someone who was arguably both the greatest French rocker and the greatest Algerian rocker, that's a high standard. Resettled in Lyon at 10, by age 17 he was DJing for roughnecks from both sides of the Mediterranean in a punk era that hadn't yet crossed the channel. Soon enough he was leading a rai-rock band that didn't worry about which was which, and over the years he became a self-made intellectual smart and soulful enough to school himself not just in French thought that added edge to his humanism but in Algerian ballads that added warmth to his grit. After a title track that celebrates such Africans as Mandela, Hendrix, Fanon, Malcolm, Marley, and Derrida follow a cameo for Swiss-Algerian feminist-shaman-autodidact Flèche Love, "Andy Waloo" a/k/a Warhol, songs worthy of the titles "Insomnia" and "Striptease," and his first composition in English, which he designated "Like a Dervish" as he whirled away forever. A-
42. Taylor Swift: Lover (Republic): It's not just that Swift knows even more about having lovers, the concept here, than she does about being a star, the concept of Reputation. It's that for female pop fans with their own lives, not just unfortunates ensnared by the vicarious vagaries of celebrity culture, lover is a more relatable concept than star. A romantic history as footloose as Swift's comes easier to a gal with unlimited access to desirable men. But even so there are millions of women who manage serial relationships, and this one's for them. Swift has earned the right to assemble "a love letter to love itself" more ways than anyone can count, including a romance with a British actor I wouldn't know from Joe Jonas that is now well into its record-breaking third year. I wish the tunecraft here retained the lightness of the mean yet hopeful "I Forgot That You Existed," an opener that seems to promise a keyb-based pure pop of Motownish allure that does not in fact ensue. I also wish I hadn't learned that the romantic pied-a-terre of "Cornelia Street" is actually a mansion with a pool. But Swift's formidable skill set has seldom served more likable or admirable ends. A-
43. Hama Sankare: Ballébé (Clermont Music '18): Sankare is a calabash specialist in his fifties who's added crucial percussion to many Malian records without ever taking the lead. Given his deep, precise baritone and conceptual reach, this was probably a loss, although you could also say he waited until he was ready, because his debut collection never falters. The steel guitars of folk-scene veteran Cindy Cashdollar add alien colors that fit right in, but the sure shot is the lead "Middo Wara," remixed to highlight loops and such by electronic wizard David Harrow and then reremixed in a slightly longer, even more striking all-instrumental mix toward the album's end. Despite the package's brief English-language summaries, I do find myself wondering what this manifestly thoughtful, resonantly tender singer is telling Bambara speakers--he sings with such distinction that I'd like a chance to feel the full force of his message. But this is the kind of African record so musically deft that such niceties end up not mattering much. A-
44. Pedro the Lion: Phoenix (Polyvinyl): Whether praising Christ or excavating angst, David Bazan has always been a natural-born depressive--his Christmas album does "Jingle Bells" as a dirge. But on his first Pedro the Lion record since 2004, recollections of his Arizona boyhood are marked by a forgiveness that testifies to his spiritual development: the air-conditioned model home the family toured on special Sunday afternoons, his parents sharing the piano bench for evening service, skateboard savings squandered on candy and soda pop, the shy fifth-grade classmate he slighted so he'd fit in himself. And if the sexual taboos built into his church training are worth resenting to this day, "Black Canyon," where some poor sufferer kills himself by jumping in front of an 18-wheeler on the freeway, is for the saved and the unsaved alike, its hero a female firefighter brave enough to face her own worst memories as she shares the suicide's last moments. A-
45. Malibu Ken: Malibu Ken (Rhymesayers): With experimental rocker Tobacco generating electronic accompaniment-not-beats because it's the rapping that grooves, 42-year-old Aesop Rock generates an album as literal and likable as his Kimya Dawson and Homeboy Sandman collabs. Where usually his gargantuan vocabulary congeals into imagery so dark it's impossible to see through, here he's often literal, even funny if you catch his drift. Start with "Tuesday," which details his disgusting homemaking protocols; "Acid King," which recalls a satanic murder from his Suffolk County childhood; the unsparing depression revery "1 + 1 = 13"; and "Churro," the tale of two bald eagles who nested so magically in Pittsburgh they got their own video feed--until they swooped down and devoured somebody's cat. A-
46. The Coathangers: The Devil You Know (Suicide Squeeze): Improbably matured into punk careerism, this initially amateur, always all-female quartet-turned-trio has slowed down by an estimated half a tad. But not counting the anthemic "F the NRA" (right, they don't actually say "F"), the lyrics--to the disinherited "5 Farms," the disconnected "Bimbo,"' the homophilic "Hey Buddy," the junkiephobic "Stranger Danger," the lithium-enabled "Lithium"--don't clear up until you consult a cheat sheet. This doesn't matter much for three reasons: because they have the gift of catchy, because we always feel they're on our side, and because splitting the vocal leads between stentorian baritone drummer Stephanie Luke and squeaky soprano guitarist Julia Kugel-Montoya imparts a dynamic range and novelty value matched by no other punk band, grrrl or otherwise. A-
47. Chuck Cleaver: Send Aid (Shake It): Ten songs lasting 27 minutes recorded by Wussy's grand old man in two days total, often backed by a drum machine although Mark and Lisa chip in, as do half a dozen others including a flesh-and-blood drummer actually named Dylan McCartney. As with most Wussy albums, the tunes don't register as tunes at first, although the refrain of the opening "Terrible Friend"--"I'm a terrible friend," it goes--sticks before the song is over once. And then suddenly the tunes stick too, just like with a Wussy album. Not that they're uplifting or anything. Bypassing his spiritual high croon for his sober middle register, Cleaver sounds not so much glummer as darker than usual, and while the situations tend failed/doomed romantic, underlying them is a world where "The Weekend That It Happened" involved an ecocatastrophe, "Children of the Corn" recapitulates a horror movie, "The Night We Missed the Horror Show" was "just another night," and "If it looks like a hole it's probably a hole." A-
48. Oumar Konaté: I Love You Inna (Clermont Music): This singer, songwriter, and above all guitarist from northern Mali made his first album in 2007 and his mark with 2014's Addoh. Three more albums followed, one studio and two live with few titles repeated. But except for the Leila Gobi-aided "Bisimillah," which brings 2013's multi-artist, anti-jihadist Festival au Desert to a climactic pitch, nothing I've heard from him equals these 10 new songs. Tougher than jam-band and more lyrical than metal, desert guitar has long been the most engaging extension of the arena-rock idea. For two distinct variations, compare the gentle "I Love You Inna" to the skanking, mournful, interactive, slow-climaxing "Almounakaf." Inna is his wife's name. "Almounakaf"'s summary reads: "Hey you! You brought all this destruction to our country. Get out!" A-
49. Epic Beard Men: This Was Supposed to Be Fun (Strange Famous): On their second why-the-fuck-not, hirsutely sub-elderly Rhode Island alt-rap careerists-without-a-cause Sage Francis, 42, and B. Dolan, 38, do their bit for class consciousness by rhyming about their work life. All their stories are grotty. But "Circle the Wagons," with its stashed body, jailhouse locale, and litany of "What did you do?"s, is its only gangsta moment. And transgressively raw though these beardos are, they're also comedians: try "Shin Splints," about racing to make a flight, or "Pistol Dave," about a dirtbag who couldn't even hack the low-level job they had the heart to give him? And then there's "Hedges," where an ex-GI moves in next to a schlubby liberal and they're both paranoid because why shouldn't they be? A-
50. Jamila Woods: Legacy! Legacy! (Jagjaguwar): This poetry-with-sophistofunk tribute to a sharp selection of 20th-century African-American art heroes plus Frida Kahlo will always be a tad too atmospheric and impressionistic to suit me. But it does both flow and signify. I highly recommend the dippy keybs that flavor "Miles," the futuristic electrothump that grounds "Muddy," the Malvina Reynolds lift that situates "Zora," and how pissed off "Basquiat" sounds. B+
51. Derek Senn: How Could a Man (self-released): In 2014 Senn mailed me a pretty good CD called The Technological Breakthrough with a hand-written bio IDing him as "a singer-songwriter from San Luis Obispo, CA with a wife, a couple of young kids, & a day job." In 2016 followed the better Avuncular. And now comes this unlikely culmination--or is it? As with any singer-songwriter, there's no real telling what's autobiographical and what isn't. But I gotta believe the adoring title song describes his wife: "an EMT she won't shy away/she'll suture cuts/she'll pick a tick right off your nuts," or how about "if you ask her to learn to play the drums and go onstage/she'll learn to play the drums and go onstage"? Ditto for the "Some Chase a Girl" saga in which "she" spurns him in Peru only to track him down in Toledo. But is "The Nuclear Family" sociological or just a bad patch? Is he really turning 50 like in "Have a Nice Day"? When you work nights in "The Song Mine," sometimes the song asserts its own logic. And sometimes, too, it'll hand you an actual tune, which heretofore in Senn's part-time career has been a problem. A-
52. Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Miri (Out Here): On Jama Ko and Ba Power, the master picker and tinkerer of Mali's ngoni lute proved that he could rock out with any desert Hendrix. But with that established he feels free to leave the amplifiers in Bamako, return to his home village, and record his most purely listenable album. Miri's lyrics seek love and honor tradition as usual. But "miri" means dream, a dream that on a title track fraught with political anxiety is lovely and arresting--pensive, nostalgic, designed to allay disquiet as thoughtful music can. The warmth of his wife Amy Sacko's vocals makes such weathered guests as Habib Koite and Afel Bocoum sound like they're trying too hard. Only on the final track does she power up. It's about Bassekou's mother. A-
53. Amber Mark: Conexão EP (Virgin EMI '18): Uber-bohemian r&b crooner gets down to structure on four legible songs-not-tracks that outline a love affair whose tether has been fraying for far too long: eros in bloom, then sex isn't everything, then I love you anyway, then prove you're worth the work. Only "Love Is Stronger Than Pride" feels less than fully heartfelt--which makes me suspect that "All the Work" is likely to set one more clueless romeo back on his heels. A-
54. Nicki Minaj: Queen (Young Money/Cash Money/Republic '18): I missed this August 2018 item while homing in on Eminem's September album because hip-hop's bureau of standards brushed hers aside as inconsequential while actively attacking his as an offense against the polity. In fact, both are quick-lipped, sharp-tongued arguments for the hip-hop they and I came up on and the endangered kind of flow both excel at. And both are funny, outrageous, self-confident announcements that neither artist has any intention of going away. Minaj articulates the stakes with the opening "As the world turns, the blunt burns/Watch them cunts learn" before reeling off three pointedly female, pointedly unfeminine sex songs so spectacular that the album never tops them. She also drops brand names like a good rap star should and shows off her connections with seven high-profile cameos, including godmother Foxy Brown, little sister Ariana Grande, postflow Swae Lee, and world speedster Eminem himself. And then there's the best touch--her hip-hop turf all too obviously contested, she doesn't sing a note. A-
55. Big Thief: U.F.O.F. (4AD): The deepest satisfaction of Big Thief is hearing something manifestly fragile hold together. Notions and emotions so fleeting they're gone before you can pin them down embody and then vanquish uncertainty before it can settle into the depression that may well lurk below. Each quiet, tiny-voiced tune emerges like a crocus pushing through the snow, and how much you enjoy as opposed to admire it will depend on how moving you find minor miracles. Not terribly fragile myself, I identify most readily with the subtle blatancies that sometimes surface--the quiet boom of the lead-in to "Jenni," or "Cattails" with its noticeable beat and subtle guitar hook sounding almost martial in this sonic context. But I'm definitely touched by the whole. A-
56. Slowthai: Nothing Great About Britain (Method): Discographically, a puzzle. Impressed enough by this 24-year-old Anglo-Bajan's rapper's down-and-dirty local color to buy the 11-track UK CD, I soon learned there was a six-track second disc I could locate only via Spotify. It begins with the pick hit "Drug Deale": "Crack dealer, phone passed around like Ambika/Shotgun shells turn your face pizza/Never shot guns just a drug dealer, hah?/Just a drug dealer, got one song it say drug dealer/Nothing to say but drug dealer." Turn that song inside out and it's why I enjoy as well as admire this guy screechy flow and all. While proud enough of his accomplishments, he's also candid not boastful about a mean not brutal past he's glad to be done with. Having described many street scenes of financially strapped everyday life, Slowthai is proud to stretch out on his sofa with a cup of tea. Not only that, he loves his mother in convincing detail. As he puts it: "Real men cry and thugs go home." A-
57. Tyler Childers: Live on Red Barn Radio I & II (Thirty Tigers/Hickman Holler '18): Born in 1991, Childers was no longer a kid in 2013 and 2014, when he recorded the two four-song EPs combined here. But he wasn't yet a man either. Instead, he was just old enough to know how good he was at the songwriting stuff even if he had trouble with the life stuff the songs drew on: "I believe if I could find my keys/I'd try to drive away" are the words of somebody who doesn't know whether "it's the wine or the coke/That makes her sound like her jaw is broke." Such well-turned dilemmas dominate this phase of his repertoire. The most manly is a heart-tugger about a pal's dead grandma: "Back when all us boys were tryin'/To make sense of all these strings/I can see her in the corner/Singin' along to all our crazy dreams." A-
58. 100 gecs, Dylan Brady & Laura Les: 1000 gecs (Dog Show): I lack both the expertise and the intrinsic interest to judge how well this file-sharing ex-St. Louis duo hitch up "the overwhelmingly scattered trends of 2010s digital music culture," as Pitchfork's wan 7.4 put it. But my mind-body continuum informs me that a good half of these 10 songs in 23 minutes activate my funnybone. Are there really digital music obsessives so stuck up that they don't think the world is a better place when an electronic munchkin squeaks the praises of their baby's ringtone? Who aren't cheered when a different munchkin purloins Little Nas X's "horse"-"Porsche" rhyme? Kids, please. A-
59. Sudan Archives: Athena (Stones Throw): Cream all over FKA Twigs's intermittently beatwise ogloudoglou if that's your idea of class. I'll take the less extruded pretensions of a violin-wielding, LA-based Cincinnati expat nee Brittney Parks, who after two experimental EPs that half-evoke her musical moniker unassumingly exploits the time-tested tunelets and classy sound effects classical training can be good for and identifies most African on a song she says is an Irish jig. Her sweet, sometimes murmured vocals the main attraction, she documents or evokes an emotional life that is sometimes also a sex life on 10 unobtrusively beatwise songs, three interludes, and a demo. She's growing and you can hear it. You root for her. A-
60. Thiago Nassif: Três (Foom '18): Guitarist-vocalist Nassif having acted as Arto Lindsay's Rio-based co-producer on 2017's Cuidado Madame, Lindsay returns the favor, producing throughout and skronking here and there. Nassif seems less a knotty type than Lindsay, yet it's his record that packs the kind of acerbic, off-kilter Tom Zé-Elza Soares buzz that delivers samba and its children from suave. The quietly disquieting opener "Desordem" spends four minutes breaking open without ever coming apart. "Bulgado"'s minute of staticky blips bursts into declarative funk. A piano arrives to sweeten and sour the 2:43 "Algodoes." And several times I swear I could hear somebody interjecting a well-miked manual typewriter. A-
61. Priests: The Seduction of Kansas (Sister Polygon): Proving that history does evolve no matter how stuck it feels, this always professional, always female-identified quartet-turned-trio has evolved or perhaps just morphed from punk into what we can still only call postpunk. This development suits a band who've always sounded like they took music lessons in high school and read too much theory in college a band who've never aimed for rousing or catchy much less simple. Bracing, usually; enjoyable, they're trying; angry, that's bedrock. What enrages them isn't just the unprecedented political morass now depressing if not immobilizing their target audience. It's bigger than that--objectification in all its guises, the futility of good intentions, the half measures passed off as progress, men who think they know what's best for them, men who think they know what's best for the world. Their music truly rocks, which is one thing they're going for and good for them. It's more absorbing than on their minimalist debut, too--thicker. But it does tend to fold in on itself--to lead nowhere. A-
62. Saba: Care for Me (Saba Pivot '18): Like Noname, Donnie Trumpet, and pathfinder Chance the Rapper, Saba makes humanist hip-hop like few outside Chance's Chicago orbit--Homeboy Sandman, Atmosphere, and fellow Chicagoans Serengeti and Open Mike Eagle come to mind, not many others. I don't mean color-blind or race-neutral--no humanist with a brain would make that race-negative mistake. I just mean what these days is called, well, relatable. Every song on this official debut is rooted in Saba's hood and brushed if not haunted by his murdered cousin and partner John Walt--"Jesus died for our sins, Walter got killed for a coat." But it's also haunted by the sexual stress most male rappers are too fake to admit, by the career anxieties of someone who gave up an Ivy League scholarship to pursue music like his absent father. And it's warmed by an unassuming, conversational flow fitted to beats that favor naturalistic keyboards and percussion. A gorgeous and affecting record. A-
63. Madonna: Madame X (Interscope): However much reviewers-come-lately mock the ones about forswearing dope and feeling the oppressed, these are well-intended ideas executed with the appropriate brio and calm, respectively. The nadirs are a "far left"/"far right" hedge and an over-cautious bid for divine mercy, both sequestered off on the "deluxe" version as a boon to the dollarwise consumer. Depending on your age, she's either your colorful Aunt Madge or a long-lost pal you ran into at a screening of Little Woods. For all of this century she's been a pro too old to conjure up the kind of sure shots that made The Immaculate Collection so no-fail yet too proud to sign off on two-tier albums like, for instance, 1986's True Blue, which begins with two songs far sharper than anything here but is back-ended by three out of five duller than any of the 13 brand-new non-deluxes. If you think Aunt Madge has become a bore, that's your petty right. If you remain fond of her, pour yourself a nice glass of chablis and listen. A-
64. The Seeds: Pushin' Too Hard: Original Soundtrack (GNP Cresendo/Big Beat): Beyond Roky Erickson's 13th Floor Elevators, L.A.'s Seeds were the only album-worthy band singled out on Lenny Kaye's 1971 Nuggets comp. Having pried their eponymous 1966 debut out of my vinyl shelves and played it for the first time in decades, I'd call it a strong B plus, and five of its 12 songs are on this documentary soundtrack, including their two best: the frustrated "Can't Seem to Make You Mine" and the Top 40 "Pushin' Too Hard," directed at a woman but taken to target society as a whole--just like the Stones' "Satisfaction," if you're old enough to recall. Although keyboardist Daryl Hooper was charged with translating Sky Saxon's brainstorms into garage-rock songfulness, the Utah-born yob christened Richard Marsh in 1937 was headman and shaman. But highlights here also include a KHJ DJ's 1967 disquisition on "flower music" at the Hollywood Bowl, a 14-minute extension of "Evil Hoodoo," and backup work for both Muddy Waters and Kim Fowley. Saxon later became the star attraction of a vegetarian Hollywood Hills commune called the Source Family. He died in 2009, leaving the band to Hooper. After putting in his time as an LA cop, '60s guitarist Jan Savage joined back on. A-
65. Raphael Saadiq: Jimmy Lee (Columbia): Having made his solo name as a reinvigorator of tight, hooky, complexly cheerful Motown retro, the former Tony! Toni! Toné! headman's first album since 2011 reverts to an updated version of T!T!T!'s slick modernist r&b. Musically, the effect is to locate it stylistically in a tragic vision of black life that's devoid of street and hood--of realities turned hip hop commonplaces that too often ignore the complexities Saadiq addresses on this one-of-a-kind album: stress, addiction, AIDS, domestic combat, love that's not enough, money problems that keep on keeping on, and mass incarceration. The only surefire hook is the whole of a gospel march called "My Walk" that's even darker than the climactic "Rikers Island Redux." But Kendrick Lamar will get your attention when he leads a finale that's also a coda: "How can I change the world but can't change myself?/How can I please the world but not God himself?/How can I have the world still need some help?/How can I see the world stuck in this box?" A-
66. Khalid: Free Spirit (RCA): Stuck with the impossible task of maintaining the matter-of-fact candor that made his debut a teenpop milestone, the double-platinum 21-year-old is too smart to try--and also too decent to sink to the male entitlement and wages-of-fame angst Biebs and so forth fobbed off on their legions. Right, he's not only getting laid and enjoying his new house in Encino, he's also having trouble adjusting to success. Some might even call him anxious. But he retains the gift of expressing his feelings in songs that cut star-time inevitabilities down to human scale. So however beyond us his privileges and woes may be, we at least feel we share a species with the guy--truisms like "Couldn't have known it would ever be this hard," "I didn't text you because I was workin'," and "If the love feels good it'll work out" are hardly exclusive to the rich and famous. Note, however, that because Khalid now enjoys access to pricier musical materials than when he was in high school, the hooks pack more texture than tune, making this the rare album that comes fully into its own when you up the volume. A-
67. Quelle Chris: Guns (Mello Music): The Detroit indie-rapper has always stuck in comradely cameos and comic bits in a Mafia accent. So of course there are diversions on this album. Yet it feels like it's all about G-U-N-S guns even when it isn't, as in "Mind Ya Bidness," which packs nothing but blunts, and the lead "Spray and Pray," which undercuts its "We load up, lift, and shoot" refrain with a "turn in they AKs for 401Ks" dissent. Ostensibly it's multiracial, too--where the action in both those tracks is located in black America, "Sunday Mass" names Nikolas C., Devin K., Stephen P., Omar M., Syed F., and Aaron A. before getting to Dylann R., and isn't it a mitzvah that most of us have already deprived these monsters of the infamy they craved by forgetting the surnames Quelle doggedly pronounces? But his toughest rhyme offers a concise racial analysis: "Monkeys who gang bang chained to the streets/Honkies with gang brain armed to the teeth." And to assure us that good things are possible even in a crisis, he joins wife Jean Grae for one of hip-hop's realest love songs before saying sayonora. A-
68. Daniele Luppi & Parquet Courts: Milano (30th '17): Assume Italian-born Hollywood movie-music pro Luppi had melodic input on this half-hour concept bagatelle's five A. Savage vocals as well as the four Karen O's, and assume too that a shot at Milanhattan cosmopolitanism was what lured Luppi in. It's still Savage's record--from "Functionalism's a bore, modernism's a chore" to "Why does he look at me like that/Must be a Christian Democrat," the clever Savage more than the socially aware Savage. How exactly that Beretta sneaks in toward the end I have not a clue. A-
69. Lewis Capaldi: Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent (Capitol): Although he shares the writing with an array of minor U.K. song doctors, this very male, unassumingly unsexist 22-year-old Scot deploys his big open white-soul voice with an originality so built-in few outside his growing female fanbase will notice. His secret weapon is that he's no dreamboat, a step or two less sexy than melodic everyman Ed Sheeran--shlubby, blokeish, with white socks, black shoes, and just-woke-up hair, he looks and acts like a goofy guy who does truly need a fangirl's love. And although more of his songs excavate romance's pain than celebrate its bliss, they come with plenty of self-examination and minimal blaming the other: even the opening "I'm not ready to be just another of your mistakes" is pretty mild, and then there's "I was getting kind of used to being someone you loved," "How come I'm the only one who seems to get in my way," and "I'm sayin' thank you to the one who let her get away." While it's likely every one of these lines has been uttered verbatim somewhere somehow, they're each one perfect, and putting them all on one album is a feat of uncommon emotional intelligence. My fond belief is that every word is Capaldi's. The song doctors just made sure they're catchy enough. A-
70. Jealous of the Birds: Wisdom Teeth (Atlantic): With arrant singer-songwriter aestheticism coming back strong, arty songs that ponder imponderables lucidly are an up. As County Armagh's Naomi Hamilton announces so winsomely, there is indeed a "chasm of language" "between the thought and the taste of this sandwich." But she has the brains to know that that's not the end of it: "Don't cast aside, dare to cleave/To the marrow of belief." If you're not quite getting what she's driving at, think it over as she compares Mozart to Sgt. Pepper, gives props to a Japanese goddess, and pursues love in Finland and on Long Island--all on one arrantly intelligent and unapologetically melodic EP. A-
71. Dua Saleh: Nur (EP) (Against Giants): In which Saleh, a Twin Cities-based nonbinary Sudanese refugee with a sociology degree, hooks up with Psymun, a Twin Cities-based noise-ambient beatmaker with Future and Young Thug credits. Over five spooky, sexy, abstract, rapped-sung tracks, they prove either that they were made for each other or that the EP format was made for them, matching weirdness for weirdness for 21 minutes without ever getting too cute or abandoning what groove they have at their disposal. As arty types go, they're not only smart but gritty. Fess up--wouldn't you be impressed if Future made something fetching of a stanza that went "You still taste like Beverly Hills/Oh, how cavalier/I just learned the weather could kill/Allegedly"? A-
72. Sneaks: Highway Hypnosis (Merge): Former Shitstain Eva Moolchan's 2016 album was one-woman minimalist rock of real but limited charm. Here she goes electro-experimental and expands the music exponentially, so that it coheres sonically even though every track is different--here charming and there disruptive, here droney and there catchy (or maybe both, like the dubwise 1:39 "Addis"). The atmospheric "Beliefs" repeats the mantra "Remove your beliefs and start again" seven times in 2:42 as if shaken to the core by whoever inspired the 56-second mantra "Holy Cow I Never Saw a Girl Like Her." Half an hour of musical whimsy that never waits long enough to get old. A-
73. Sharon Van Etten: Remind Me Tomorrow (Jagjaguwar): Van Etten's big voice, controlled tempos, and dramatic aura have never tempted me to enter her world. But from the attention-getting opener--delivered with a modicum of emotion and forethought, "Sitting at the bar, I told you everything/You said, 'Holy shit, you almost died'" should get any listener with a heart to the end of the quatrain--I found myself hooked on her first album since 2014, which fans agree is her best without coming together on why. I chalk up my own interest to its diminished drama. If the tales here still tend toward screwed-up relationships and past misadventures rather than expanding on the cover photo of her two-year-old perched on a hilariously messy living room rug, so be it. She'll get there eventually. A-
74. Alex Chilton: Ocean Club '77 (Norton '15): Chilton's 1977 NYC residency fell apart before the year was over, but it began on a high--the young punk/alt godfather gigging amongst us, nowhere more mythically than at his February 21-22 engagement at Mickey Ruskin's short-lived, way-downtown successor to Max's Kansas City. I attended the first of these shows, and it was incandescent--jammed, noisy, charged with ambient adrenaline. Even a quality recording like this one can't capture such an up, but you can definitely hear a more raucous, confident, and engaged Chilton than was his quirky norm. The 16-song set leads with the brand new "All of the Time," includes five loud Big Star covers plus a rough-hewn reading of the Box Tops smash "The Letter," introduces Chilton's great nonhit "My Rival," and covers the Ventures, the Beach Boys, the Seeds, and Chuck Berry's "Memphis." Cult history is being made. Of course we were psyched. A-
75. Serengeti: Dennis 6e (People '18): The biracial Chicago rapper born David Cohn is so prolific I can't claim to have kept up--multiple plays of 2016's Doctor My Own Patience and 2018's To the Max didn't nail down his shifting persona hard enough to keep me plugging. But though Kenny Dennis, the rapping telephone repairman who is Cohn's best-known creation, has gone through many phases of a biography I wouldn't dare summarize, he's such a mensch he always feels earthbound. On this supposed farewell to Kenny--"You can't do Jason Part 23. They stopped Jason at, like, nine," Geti has claimed--continuity is simulated and reinforced by the textured electronics of Minneapolis rap-rocker Andrew Broder, a/k/a Fog. Disconsolate and alone in Orlando as memories of his lost Jueles "come back like winter clothes," aging white guy Kenny contends with bad knees and a dislocated shoulder, name-checks Steely Dan and Judge Mathis, disses drug dependency and 40-minute smoke breaks, rips a letter to shreds, and consigns unnamed rappers to landfill. After warning that he will jam you up if you bite his style, he closes by rhyming "sorry," "Atari," "calamari," and "Maori." A-
76. Bob Mould: Sunshine Rock (Merge): Thirty years post-Hüsker Dü, 25 post-Sugar, the now Berlin-based Mould finally intensifies the power-trio format he helmed with an unstinting hand while delivering the tunes late Hüsker Dü drummer Grant Hart could never put across without him. Four of the most winning are called "Sunshine Rock," "Sunny Love Song," "Camp Sunshine," and "Western Sunset," so maybe some life-change has made him a happy fella in a political morass he references without targeting. Never does he fully generate the surging de facto optimism of either of his old bands, and I'll blame the morass, thank you. But this is the first time the solo Mould has come close to what he was once capable of, and that he's managed it this late should encourage us all. A-

And It Don't Stop, Jan. 26, 2020

2018

Essay | --

2020