the whole damn year is over so here's a top 20 of good albums:
1. Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks: Limited Event Series Soundtrack. Feels weird having an OST as my #1 for the year but this one deserves it entirely. Takes the jazzy ambiance of the OST for the first two seasons and takes it to a new level. Simultaneously, it feels darker, colder, and emptier, which perfectly represents the new season (which you should watch because it's the best thing that's ever been on TV).
2. Richard Dawson - Peasant. Richard Dawson is one of the most interesting contemporary folk artists around today and he's hit a new high with this album. Usually, an album with medieval themes would make me groan, but Dawson sidesteps dull cliches. No silly tales of knights and princesses, but a brutally real depiction of the filth and misery of medieval life and a broader tale about the hope and woes of life in a tightly knit community. Dawson's guitar style is as jagged and crude as ever, sounding proficient and amateurish at the same time. It's such a great folk album.
3. Oxbow - Thin Black Duke. Have been loving this band for a few years now so it's very exciting to see them return with a new album. I feared they might have lost their mojo after not releasing an album for so long, but luckily my fears quickly dissipated once the singles started rolling out. Once more, Oxbow's juggles with elements of noise rock, blues, and jazz, and comes out sounding entirely unique. New are the symphonic elements on a few tracks. The best rock record of the year hands down.
4. Bedwetter - Volume 1: Flick Your Tongue Against Your Teeth and Describe the Present. A side project of Travis Miller AKA Lil Ugly Mane where he dives into the deepest realms of his psychology and it's not pretty. There's only a few tracks with lyrics, but considering how heavy they are in terms of subject matter (depression, trauma, addiction etc) it's probably better in short doses with instrumental breaks in between anyway. The beats are murky, hazy, and overall very unique and they add to the album's dark themes very well.
5. Mark Kozelek with Ben Boye & Jim White - self-titled. My favorite Kozelek project of the year (and there were many). Lyrically it's what you'd come to expect of a Kozelek/Sun Kil Moon release these days: Mark speak-sings (more speaking than singing) about whatever he feels like in diary-like fashion, jumping from one subject to the next, mixing tales about his day-to-day life with political commentary and his love for cats and whatever else comes to his mind. Instrumentally, however, it's more interesting and varied than the usual folky fare of Kozelek's music. There's piano ballads, jazzy tracks, and folk rock songs, providing the right amount of variety to make the album not boring (it's 90 minutes long). Whether you like it ultimately comes down to whether you like the direction Mark's been heading in since 2012's Benji, in any case I'm a fan.
6. Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked at Me. A very difficult listen and something I haven't listened to more than twice since its release (hence why it's lower on my list than it could have been). It's a very instrumentally sparse singer/songwriter album that has Phil Elvrum singing about the death of his wife and how this impacted him. He doesn't use flowery prose, he doesn't try to make it look beautiful, it's all raw honesty, so private that it feels like you're intruding in his life. It's painful but it's so good.
7. Uniform - Wake In Fright. I don't expect many people to like this album and honestly, it's rather flawed, but it tickles me in juuust the right way. Noisy industrial rock tracks with a vocalist who spit-shouts his lyrics, messy in its execution but absolutely satisfying. They also go EBM on one track and it's strangely catchy in all its ugly wrongness.
8. Death Grips - Steroids. One of their better releases imo, very very fun set of tracks that segue smoothly into one another, creating a short but satisfying shot of Death Grips.
9. Charli XCX - Pop 2. Neither Charli nor PC Music were particularly interesting to me before, but their synthesis somehow works really well. Pop music that is sweet and addictive like sugar with the interesting style of the PC Music producers but without their pretensions. No-nonsense fun, basically. There are a few tracks I could do without and some of the many features on this thing really miss the mark, but Carly Rae Jepsen, Cupcakke, and Caroline Polachek on the other hand are great on this thing.
10. Kelly Lee Owens - self-titled. Kinda like the experimental ambient pop of Jenny Hval (who features on this album) crossing over with the technopop of Laurel Halo. The result is simultaneously chill and danceable.
11. Endon - Through the Mirror. The only memorable metal record for me this year. Absolutely balls-to-the-walls amalgamation of all sorts of metal and punk rock (noisecore/powerviolence/black metal/sludge metal/you name it they got it), constantly loud and intense as fuck. Gets tiresome at points due to how relentless it is, but oh well. Music to destroy your eardrums to.
12. Denzel Curry - 13. One of the better artists in trap rap thanks to his killer flow and great beats, more aggressive and rawer than most of them. It's short, it's fun, and it's got two of his best cuts - Bloodshed and Zeltron 6 Billion. Listen to this.
13. Paul White - Everything You've Forgotten. Short and varied beat tape from Danny Brown's main producer. That's all you need to know, really.
14. Cornelius - Mellow Waves. Not a lot of real standout tracks on here, but it's just a really really pleasant experience. Dreamy pop music that seamlessly integrates electronica, rock, and folk into its sound.
15. UUUU - self-titled. I literally listened to this a couple of hours ago for the first time, it probably would be higher on this list if I gave it a couple more listens, but as of right now this is a solid place for this album. UUUU sees (ex-)members of seminal post-punk band Wire come together with Thighpaulsandra of Coil and a relatively unknown Italian musician for an exciting album of semi-improvised experimental rock. It's good.
16. Lil B - Black Ken. Too much filler, but at its best this is some of Lil B's finest work. I love listening to the stretch of tracks that starts with Pretty Boy Skit and ends with Zam Bose (In San Jose), unfortunately the stuff that comes afterwards is hit-or-miss, but when this tape gets good it gets great. Stupid fun.
17. Oiseaux-Tempête - AL-'AN ! الآن (And Your Night Is Your Shadow - A Fairy-Tale Piece of Land to Make Our Dreams). Another record I haven't been able to give as much time to as I would like. This is the first new post-rock release in forever to actually interest me. Electronica and Arabic folk influences make this album interesting and it's more concerned with creating a brooding atmosphere than with crescendos and whatnot. Better than whatever Godspeed's doing these days.
18. Zeitkratzer, Svetlana Spajic, Dragana Tomic & Obrad Milic - Serbian War Songs. Yet another very recent find. A bunch of experimental musicians come together to create unique covers of slavic folk songs. Their take on these tunes is industrial, brooding, and outright oppressive. Harrowing and difficult, but a jewel in the rough for people who are into the experimental and avant-garde side of things.
19. Avey Tare - Eucalyptus. I'm mostly just glad that the Animal Collective guys are still capable of making good music despite the band's descent into mediocrity. This album evokes AnCo's earlier, folkier period, which happens to be one of their better periods. A bit lowkey, but a very nice and calm album.
20. Brockhampton - SATURATION III. I'm not fully on board with the hype just yet, mostly because I only started listening to these guys when this album dropped. I'll give them time to grow on me more. For the time being, BOOGIE and SISTER/NATION are some of the best tracks of this year and the rest's solid as well, which is enough to earn it a place on my top 20.