Spotify
This is the first album of completely original material Kozelek has put out under his own name, although a number of Sun Kil Moon albums have only featured him and his guitar (and, indeed, Mark had said this album was going to be released under the SKM moniker until a couple of months before release). The lyrics on this one can be be described as stream-of-consciousness, but, rather than focusing on experiences on tour, this album focuses a bit more on Kozelek's life in San Francisco and the memories stirred during day-to-day life there (and other places he considers home, like New Orleans). Indeed, opening track "This Is My Town" is a hymn to how much Mark loves San Francisco. I spent quite a bit of time writing about tracks off of this album in my write-up of Mark's recent gig in Chico, so I'll point you there for further musings on the tracks. This album was recorded in San Francisco hotel rooms, largely with a 1960 Fender Jazzmaster guitar. The music is some of the most hypnotic of his career, and, as much as I love the lyrics and vocals, I'd gladly buy an instrumental version of this one. On album highlight "My Love for You is Undying," Mark sings "Though some may find my specifying agonizing and trying, long-winded and unsatisfying, others may find it hypnotizing, comforting, and inspiring, relatable and consoling." I'm definitely in the latter camp, and this one is definitely hypnotizing, comforting, inspiring, relatable, and consoling.
Favorite Tracks: "My Love for You is Undying," "666 Post," "I Cried During Wall Street"
Spotify
Age Of is the central part of Daniel Lopatin's MYRIAD story. The album is described as a four-part "epochal song cycle." I totally love this sort of thing, and I find Lopatin's concept fascinating. There's a great Fader article on it. But, even if the high concept thing isn't your bag (baby), there's a lot to love here. Lopatin's Oneohtrix Point Never project has been putting out essential experimental electronic releases (check out Replicas and Garden of Delete) for over a decade. This album is still built around OPN's typical tropes (sampling, vintage synths), but, here, we learn that Lopatin is also a hell of a pop songwriter, as best evinced on the stunning "Babylon." Age Of paints a pretty dire picture of the state of things. Indeed, he seems to think we're getting towards the collapse part of the cultural cycle. However, it is still a cycle, and rebirth is promised on the other side. Regardless of whether such collapse happens (my money is on yes), this album makes for a good primer for understanding apocalypse.
Favorite Tracks: "Age Of," "Babylon," "The Station," "Black Snow"
Bandcamp
By far the most political album on this list, Pastoral's opener, "Folly," kicks off with a nightmarish voice asking "What species is this? What century? What atmosphere?" From here, we immediately leap into the pulsing beat of "Better in My Day," with its repeated chants of "Just look at these kids now (no respect)," a song from written from the perspective of backwards-looking British citizens who clearly think the Golden Age has passed. What we get with Pastoral, one of my very favorites of the year (and certainly one of the creepiest on this list), is a folk horror reading of Brexit, where the exit of Great Britain from the European Union is read as summer icumen in. This is a fascinating song cycle, and, regardless of whether you agree with Gazelle Twin's Elizabeth Bernholz or not, it's worth engaging with fully. This is one to be heard on headphones without distractions. The album fades out (or, should I say, drops out) with a field recording of British folk staple "Over the Hills and Far Away," reminding you of the tradition that, behind all of the electronics and distortion, Gazelle Twin is operating from: that of the English using song to explore the most difficult aspects of being English.
Favorite Tracks: "Better In My Day," "Glory," "Tea Rooms," "Hobby Horse"
Bandcamp
Boy, this one would've been tough to write about back at Stage 1, and so much has happened since then. Back in the fall of 2016, Leyland Kirby informed the world that The Caretaker, the musical persona that Kirby has released his ballroom meditations on memory through since the late 90s, had been diagnosed with dementia and that his final project, Everywhere at the End of Time, would document his neurodegeneration. Truly, Stage 1 was some of the most pleasant listening of Kirby's career, but the knowledge of what was to come hung heavy over it. This project uses the 78rpm big band samples that The Caretaker has utilized through his entire career, but takes their ultimate distortion to fully unseen depths. In the first few stages, the pain was felt most acutely through the titles of the songs ("Things that are beautiful and transient," "A losing battle is raging," What does it matter how my heart breaks," "Last moments of pure recall," and "The way ahead feels lonely," a title that nearly reduces me to tears every time I read it). Before proceeding, it's worth letting you know that one of my best friends, my grandfather, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's shortly before these albums started being released. His situation isn't as dire as what The Caretaker describes, though, of course, that nasty word "yet" hangs like an atom bomb over this statement. For Stages 4 & 5, we've left the point where the pieces still have typical titles (& simple, short durations) and moved into long pieces composed of incredible, growing, jumbled distortion of the pieces that have grown familiar since the start of the project two years ago. Here, we've instead got stabbingly descriptive titles like "Stage 4 Post Awareness Confusions," "Stage 4 Temporary Bliss State," "Stage 5 Advanced Plaque Entaglements," and "Stage 5 Sudden Time Regression Into Isolation." Although I eagerly ate up the first two phases when they came out, I've been more and more hesitant to engage as the series moved on and waited months on Stage 5. Never has music which could easily have been termed "easy listening" at the start distorted into something so damn hard. This can't be easy for Kirby to put together, and I've never encountered something tougher to listen to, but it's worth it. I won't jot down any favorite tracks from this one. This needs to be experienced as a whole to really feel the pain and confusion of familiar sounds being distorted. Indeed, as the hours go by, the repeated (I think? It's disorienting like that) samples feel more and more like very personal memories fall apart and becoming entangled. Listening from Stage 1 to Stage 5 takes just over five hours, and the full piece, which will be completed in March of this year, will likely last close to 7 hours. It'll be harrowing, but it's worth it. With the high prevalence of neurodegenerative disorders, I find it very unlikely that anyone reading has remained untouched by these (sometimes slow, sometimes criminally quick, always too quick) ransackers of the mind. Expect a longer post about the series as a whole (and on The Caretaker's unrivaled body of work) when the last installment comes out in a few months.
I was intending to get a little further down the list tonight that I did, but, man, writing about Everywhere at the End of Time really took it out of me. I'll write about the last six albums on the list tomorrow or Monday. Tonight, I'll leave you with a short list of the best reissues of the year.
Best Reissues of the Year
Love and Work: The Lioness Sessions - Songs: Ohia (Bandcamp) [Seriously, this is a must-listen, even if you don't already know Molina's Lioness album. Even just the outtakes are better than most albums, full stop. More on Molina, and on this album in particular, in a later post.]
Life Is Unfair - Black Box Recorder (Bandcamp) [Some additional live recordings appear to be available exclusively (?) on Spotify.]
Cherry Red's totally essential Felt reissues (Spotify) [It was the Year of Lawrence. If you've never check these out before, do it. I especially recommend Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty, The Splendour of Fear, The Strange Idols Pattern and Other Short Stories, Ignite the Seven Cannons, The Seventeenth Century, Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, Poem of the River, The Pictorial Jackson Review, Train Above the City, and Me and a Monkey on the Moon. Yep, that's the whole discography. If you want a good starting spot, you could go with Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty. Or The Splendour of Fear. Or The Strange Idols Pattern and Other Short Stories. Or... You get the picture.]
Cherry Red's pREServed deluxe editions of The Residents' Meet The Residents, Third Reich & Roll, Duck Stab/Buster & Glen, and Fingerprince (Only the deluxe version of Fingerprince is available on any streaming service, but here are links to the standard versions of Meet The Residents, Third Reich & Roll, and Duck Stab/Buster & Glen so you can see if this is something you'd be into.)
Cherry Red's (man, these guys are delivering) reissue of The Fall's criminally underrated Levitate, their 1997 album featuring, for the last time, Steve Hanley, Martin Bramah (on one track), Simon Wolstencroft, and currently missing colossus Karl Burns (Spotify) [MES is dead; Long live MES!]
[Part 1 of this list is available here and Part 3 is available here.]
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