TDP’s FAVORITES OF 2020
Wow, what a year for music.
That’s not an ironic statement. Quite possibly one of the most stressful years in recent memory has also resulted in a smorgasbord of incredible releases. Over the first three months, and then over the next nine, I estimate listening to over seven hundred records, many of which were submitted to me directly. I’m genuinely thankful for all of it! I may be coming into the new year with an acute hypochondria and agoraphobia, but also with a stack of new favorites that’ll comfort me for many a moon after.
I’ve got a ton of music I want to write about, but first I want to lay down what I’m aiming for in a year-end list. Couple of things:
–Bandcamp beat me to the punch, but we’ve got the same idea: no rankings. The whole idea behind the color rating system was to mitigate subjectivity as much as reasonable, and a year-end list with a certifiable numeric ranking scale defeats that point entirely. Instead, I’ll just be listening each record alphabetically by artist and stressing why they made the list.
-Speaking on the topic of subjectivity, this year I’ve really called into question my own opinions of objectivity in music journalism, a topic I’m really excited to write about in the coming months. To that end, I’m putting together two separate lists:
- One that lists my absolute favorites of the year (TDP’s Favorites Of)
- One that illuminates some arbitrarily great records (TDP’s Best Of)
The list you’re reading right now contains entries that would easily fit on the latter list, except they hit me on such a personal level that I felt inclined to go just a little bit deeper. From a non-critical standpoint, these were the records that I’ll personally carry forward long after this year ends. Look out for the actual Best Of list coming later in the month!
Hope you enjoy! I’ll provide Bandcamp links whenever possible, so if you like the music, make sure to support these artists!
al Riggs & Lauren Francis – Bile and Bone
I’ve passed dark hours drunk and stretched out on benches, covered in streetlight glow and cool evening air. I’ve spent nights in the private rooms of tall apartments and in suburban houses; I’ve nervously paced across blocks, waiting on text responses and sending pictures as buildings towered over in an impressive canopy. I’ve holed up in cafes alone and buzzed; I’ve dined on tempeh and falafel near Christmas, studying the din of string lights spread over foggy windows. I treasure those young, single nights in my own company because they defined how I coped with being young and single, even if the reality is that they hurt like a motherfucker at the time.
I relive every one of those nights when I listen to Al Riggs’ Bile and Bone, the Durham songwriter’s collaboration with guitarist Lauren Francis. This record has taken up whole nights of my year, when I’d sit in my apartment and feel Riggs’ uneven voice and Alli Rogers’ impeccable sound design penetrate my heart in ways only a handful of records have been able to.
I’ll say it right now, this is not a record for everyone. Its intentions are evident right from the album art. Riggs’ amorous encounter with a “Werewolf” involves that most cherished of tropes, with Cameron Lucente’s gorgeous artwork punctuating each page. The kitsch store in “Love Is An Old Bullet” displays an Anita Bryant halloween mask; the cardboard confederate flag in “Bile and Bone” is “always in danger of being flown”. Though every song shimmers with touches of electric guitar and keyboard, Riggs’ acoustic provides the foundations, creating an intoxicating combination of rough and rounded, strong and vulnerable. It’s a romantic record where romance is often danced around, kept at arms’ length. Though the subject matter isn’t relatable to everyone, the vulnerability present throughout may very well be.
What’s stayed with me most is Riggs’ voice. Pitch-wise it’s far from perfect, but that roughness translates so well both in a visceral sense and in the context of the record’s queerness. A lot of queer art bears its scars proudly, whether those scars stem from self-loathing or spurned connection or real physical abuse. To be queer in a heteronormative and cisnormative society is to be conscious of, and resistant to, a sense of imperfection; there’d be no reason to be proud without it.
A more even voice would take away what Riggs has got going here, where their aching quaver feels like an exposed bone jutting from scraped skin. And when it hits, as on the show-stopping climax of “Apex Twin” and the tender “Livalon,” the effect is pure magic. I can’t help but hear myself in that voice, at least the part of myself that spent all those nights reaching out and waiting for something or someone to save me. It’s why I’ve been coming back to it since September, and why I’ll probably continue to keep it in rotation for years.
Bartees Strange – Live Forever
Rock music’s been so thoroughly in a down period after the enervating indie saturation of the early 2010s that it’s perfectly poised for an upswing, and goddamn if artists like Bartees Strange aren’t set to lead the charge. The first time I listened to Strange’s debut record (something I had to finagle from an intern on Reddit) I literally started jumping up and down in excitement. Here was somebody who was willing to ante up on ambition and follow through capably, something I’m finding increasingly rare in young alternative artists likely because it’s notoriously difficult while yielding less and less payoff every year.
What made Live Forever so exciting on first listen – its sense of adventure – is exactly what allows it to endure months later. Strange plays around with a bunch of different energies, yet each feel in lockstep with its world. It’s hard to imagine the record without the Killers-like “Mustang” coinciding with the club thump of “Flagey God” and the jazzy slide of “In A Cab.” Similarly, the country twinges of “Fallen For You” line up with the Kings of Leon drama embedded in “Stone Meadows.” Strange finds these immediate connections between vastly different sounds and weaves them together into something that sounds like nothing else but him. At the end of the year, that assessment still holds up.
In my original review I stressed how effectively Strange crossed newfound stylistic boundaries, but that feels erroneous on further appraisal. Strange was right to say that the genres he so effortlessly traversed were essentially his to begin with. Those sonic links to Kings of Leon and The Killers come from decades worth of chain links that lead back to the rock and blues of the early 1900s, before Elvis whited things up for mass appeal. That’s not to say Live Forever gets its power simply because its a reclaiming; rather, it feels like a small but formidable step in course-correcting, finally allowing rock the diversity that so many other genres have seen (and benefited from) since last decade.
DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ – Charmed
I’ve just recently spilled words about this record, so please let me direct you there if you need to know about this monstrous house record. But that was a non-comprehensive assessment of a three-hour record released less than two weeks beforehand. Since then it’s revealed its myriad charms among replay after replay, especially starting halfway through when listening fatigue hasn’t set in yet.
That back-half trudge, it turns out, has its own gems. “Down With Love” cruises across a beach sunset, a little akin to a Carly Rae Jepsen remix. “(Just Reminds Me That) We’re All Alone” carries a touch of melancholy as its sampled violins pierce as jazzy piano chords pierce through the track’s thump. And “Alrighty, Then” imagines mid 2000s mall-punk as a dance genre, pairing The Skies of America’s biggest single with record scratches and poolside fervor.
Meanwhile, the original verdict stands. On a track-by-track basis, this might be the most joyous listen of the year. Every song, no matter where you decide to dive in, is densely packed with detail. A majority of them conclude with a heightened sense of energy relative to where they started. The samples that DJ Sabrina peppers throughout constantly delight in their singularity. (T-Pain popping in from his Twitch stream to provide some comic relief in “Eeeeyyyy?” Sure! A Mario 64 speedrun clip in “Nyakuza Metro Cats?” Why not?)
Charmed, unfortunately, is the kind of record that can only come out in secret. On a more visible platform, it wouldn’t be possible to insert a Gwen Stefani sample in the opening track and expect to get away with it. DJ Sabrina’s anonymity – and for all we know it could be multiple people – allows a certain freedom to circumvent the ire of ravenous label conglomerates looking to lock down usage of the music they happen to own. Yet assuming she falls into the trap that forced the Avalanches to change tracks, Charmed proves she could easily move into original synth-pop. The talent, and the industriousness, is clearly there. In the meantime, I’m likely gonna spin this behemoth until I expire.
Fiona Apple – Fetch The Bolt Cutters
I think people may be tired of hearing and reading about this record. It’s understandable, but also perhaps a little unfair. Fetch The Bolt Cutters is a product of inertia, in that it couldn’t occur without two decades of struggling and learning and overcoming and growing comfortable, at last, with the self. It’s also a product of inertia in that it rocketed out of critical circles from the get-go, earning Pitchfork’s first coveted 10 since Kanye West’s bombastic 2010 opus.
That’s why it’s unfair to Fiona Apple that people feel a little trepidation about calling her fifth album an instant classic. Not because it is; as much as people want instantly gratifying results, that will only ever come with time. But considering many of Apple’s records, including 2012’s The Idler Wheel…, are now classics in their own rights, most of us served up Bolt Cutters with a hefty dose of confirmation bias upon its release. Of course it’s brilliant; Fiona Apple is brilliant. We all know that already, and we assume she doesn’t really care one way or another, which is part of why we love her.
Yet as hard as we try, we’re just not going to know as much as we want to about Apple as we’d like, and in the current era that’s refreshing. The vast majority of pre-releases and interviews portray Apple in a carefree, almost childlike mode, as if the music she presented here were right off the top of her head and not borne of years and years of thoughtful construction. She doesn’t have an online presence, yet she stays active online by building her own universe on (of all places) Tumblr. For all the mass appeal and commercial success she accomplished with her Grammy-winning debut, today she operates like she’s post-career, just settling in and having fun. If only every musician could live in such comfort, without the fear of being forgotten.
Fully enjoying Fetch The Bolt Cutters, as it does for another acclaimed release of 2020, involves your appreciation for Apple as a product (casualty, really) of an industry that’s long pushed down whole groups of people in the name of marketability. There’s already a thick coating of self-assurance around the record’s improvised percussion and itinerant melodies. But knowing just what Apple’s been through, and how she normally conducts herself, makes that self-assurance seem like pure bravery. It’s the crossroads between hard-earned wisdom and uncaged imagination, between courage and confidence, that makes this record arguably even more remarkable than anything she’s put out yet.
And let’s not forget, the songwriting on this record would be impeccable even without all that background. Out of the thousand or so songs I’ve had the fortune to listen to this year, “Newspaper” unquestionably remains the most astonishing among them. It’s a song about the Great Imbalance, the one she’s been singing about since “Criminal,” but structured so strongly it could be a modern fable. Listen to how it starts from nothing, just a dark fog and a low rumble, and slowly builds momentum through just banged percussion and Fiona’s layered vocal tracks. Listen to how she lays down the point in one opening stanza (“I too wanted him to be proud of me/And then I just wanted him to make amends”). There’s a chord structure at play here, but it’s only evident through that voice, which moves across touches of lilting harmonies like a Greek chorus. It’s a brilliant move, as is her accelerando as the verse repeats, as is each explosive bridge as the song grows like a snowball. I find myself shaking my head in disgust on every play, so effective is its storytelling, so palpable its vitriol.
That ability to convey a feeling and a story at the same time – an established gift of Apple’s – invades almost every track here. The power “Heavy Balloon” would be evident to anybody with a history of depression, but it’s the crisp production and the rawness of that chorus that elevate it from an examination to an anthem. The title track never really explodes, but it constantly threatens to, which is way more effective. “For Her” takes serious subject matter, the kind that a band like Pearl Jam would tragically cornify early in their career, and makes it both blindingly light and devastatingly heavy without a hint of cliché. And “Ladies” arrives with a dazzling benevolence, as easy to appreciate from a distance as it is to bask in.
For all the conversation about its assumed perfection, Fetch The Bolt Cutters is almost the antithesis of a perfect record, were such a thing possible. It’s filled with “mistakes,” fuck-ups both purposeful and purposefully left-in, odd choices and weird structures, rough edges and raw corners. It’s not perfect; instead, it’s real. It wants you to love it honestly, flaws and all. That’s what I aspire to chase.
Fleet Foxes – Shore
Robin Pecknold’s surprise-released fourth record under Fleet Foxes makes this list easily, because it’s the only record I listened to this year that genuinely made me break down in tears. It’s significant to me because, as paraphrased from The Idler Wheel…’s “Left Alone”, my tears have calcified over. Nothing gets me to cry anymore, and that’s a real shame when there’s been quite a lot to justifiably cry over.
It’s also cheating maybe, and perhaps the main reason why I keep my bests and favorites separate. You see, everybody who cares about music has those few particular bands that mean the world to them, and Fleet Foxes, embarrassing as it may be to some, is one of those bands to me. In the liner notes of Fleet Foxes, Pecknold writes about how music has the power to provide another dimension to memory, which is such a classically-Pecknold move: self-iconizing through honest humility.
The thing is that it works on me every time. The innocent wandering of Helplessness Blues melted the January campus snow around me; their idyllic self-titled colored the spring of my coming-out; Crack-Up, for its proggy presumptuousness, brought me comfort in an uneasy summer spent living with an ex-boyfriend and slaving over a stressful job. God forbid if Pecknold knew how much he and his compatriots soundtracked momentous occasions in my life – something I know he’s undoubtedly grappled with as any handful of musicians operating under intense expectations would – because I honestly owe him more than I know I could offer.
As if kismet, Shore arrived right at the autumnal equinox: the only season left, at least in my life, without a Fleet Foxes record to ground it. Besides the fact that solstices and equinoxes are commonly fruitful periods for artists given that creative projects are commonly inspired by shifting circumstances, t’s also not hard to see autumn as the defining season of 2020 in a way. In decline, in death, in decay and regression and recession, the fall easily represents our spirits as we watched aghast at our country entering the last moments of its assumed exceptionalism.
This is what hit me the moment I read the lyrics along to “Sunblind”. As Pecknold rattles off dedications to other musical artists, from people he’d never known (Elliott Smith) to people he’d likely considered peers (David Berman), all the pointless death and brazen injustice that defined the summer came to a vertex point in my mind. I realized then, perhaps as you had, that I had’t given myself time to process how much change had occurred both within my surroundings and within myself.
But the eulogizing occurring in “Sunblind” isn’t wrathful or sorrowful or anything else approaching the negativity I had come to acknowledge as a constant then, in my news and social media feeds. Instead it felt benevolent, almost celebratory. The connecting line between someone like me and someone like Robin Pecknold is how much importance we place on music: how the sounds augments our moods, how the lyrics illuminate our own circumstances, how we rely on our favorites to bring joy and to cope. Though my own insecurities and self-esteem issues make it really hard for me to connect with others (especially musically)those opening moments on Shore brought me a sense of kinship that I hadn’t felt in a long, long while.
And then I guess I broke down, because I was finally mourning all that senseless death and all that brazen injustice, but also coming upon the first glimmer of hope I had experienced in a long time. That feeling kept overcoming me throughout my second listen, in the harvest light of “Featherweight” and the sunset glimmer of “Going-to-the-Sun Road”. It just felt too perfect to experience a moment without an exact parallel – an equinox – with something that quite handily was easing my pain in ways nothing else could.
Arbitrarily, Shore is also a pretty damn great record, which at this point is becoming a given from Pecknold. Like other Fleet Foxes records, it’s thoughtful with how it uses classic folk imagery in a contemporary context. Its melodies are typically exquisite, especially his vocal harmonies and choices of instrumentation. If his intention, as he stated shortly after Crack-Up’s release in 2017, was to counterbalance that record’s cryptic dourness with a return to pop structures, then that’s a job well done.
Yet what’s still most striking about Shore, as the year comes to a close, is its sense of cautious optimism and its ebullience in the face of a dying society. Turns out we need to be reminded that things end eventually, that were not defined by our seasons and that there’s plenty to be grateful for. My guess is that we’re gonna need a lot more of those as our governance continues to abandon us and our planet keeps turning in a death spiral.
Jessie Ware – What’s Your Pleasure?
It still blows my mind,that disco emerged as a chief motif in some of the year’s best pop music. Disco’s supremacy in the mid-to-late ‘70s engendered clubs rife with stacked bodies, illicit drug use and liberating sexual encounters; musically, not only were its string-laden arrangements expensive to produce, but its focus on physicality really only made sense in a public space. Yet in a year of shuttered clubs and social distancing, people were buying up roller skates and living the new American pastime: chasing a fantastical version of an exotic past.
Dua Lipa may have laid claim to a spot at the top of the pecking order with Future Nostalgia, and Doja Cat may have crossed over from memelord to actual superstar in the technicolor “Say So,” but there’s really two disco-inflected records I couldn’t stop playing the moment they entered my life.
What’s Your Pleasure? succeeds as a record in part because of its commitment to disco as an elemental force of sensuality. I never got the chance to review it in full because I need up discovering it months after its release (a poor excuse that I’ll need to work out of my habits next year), but I still ended up returning to it over and over because it contains some of the best pop music this year on a purely structural level.
What’s Your Pleasure showcases just how much Ware understands the inner workings of a pop song; many times here, it feels like she’s just showing off. “Spotlight” kicks off the record with a red herring of recognizable balladry before diving right into warm lighting and dramatic strings, becoming a tour-de-force of crescendoing tension anchored by a brilliant chorus and a superb breakdown. Stylistically, Ware continues to bounce around while staying within the wheelhouse of’70s dance music, from the electric jitters of “Soul Control” to the sensual funk of “What’s Your Pleasure?” to the strut of “Step Into My Life.” Its singles obviously slap, but everything around it is arguably just as accomplished, especially the frizziness of “Read My Lips” and the roller rink of “Mirage (Don’t Stop)” (the intro of which always gives me goosebumps).
Similar to Roisin Machine, What’s Your Pleasure? is a confident display of songwriting that embraces what disco represented during its heyday. Unlike it, it’s more id-heavy and less self-conscious, which in a sense makes it a much more fun listen. Either way, to me, both of these records have the potential to stand up to the test of time. Despite their anachronistic styles, they’re both deep listens that take full advantage of their release periods to remind us of how good physical music can get.
Pink Siifu – NEGRO
I grew up in a small town near the coast of Massachusetts, in Plymouth County; after high school I pursued a degree in the western part of the state. Massachusetts – really any New England state – is a place of dynasties, filled with homogenous “educated” families that maintain a peculiarly traditional way of life, at least where there’s not a city sprawling outward. It may still have a reputation for staunch liberalism, but it’s not, by our current standards, a diverse place. Suffice it to say it wasn’t until I moved out to Washington state, in a town south of Seattle, where I finally found myself in an actually diverse environment. I’d get on a bus and immediately find myself surrounded by an even pie-chart of ethnicities and economic backgrounds, an unfamiliar sight that eventually became second nature the longer I engaged with it. It’s embarrassing to admit now, but it was a baby step to acknowledge how little I really considered my place in that conversation, but a step nonetheless.
The racism that Martin Luther King Jr. called out so many years ago doesn’t just takes form in the loud, ugly, red-hat vitriol that’s so easy to call out on Twitter. King famously also took the white moderate to task, addressing how complacency in a system designed to court white supremacy could prove just as damaging as actual out-and-proud bigotry. There’s few better habitats for the white moderate than my home state, and while I don’t consider myself one, I grew up in the tutelage of seemingly nobody but.
Reckoning with the environment I grew up in, the unfamiliarity with the black experience and the resulting undercurrent of racism that manifested itself in me, wouldn’t have happened without the incendiary events of 2020. This was a year unmistakably defined by strife, but the flip side to strife is the potential for growth. Though it felt uncomfortable and exhausting and played upon my anxieties, I can say I’ve come out of this year with clearer eyes and a deeper understanding, of how insidious American racism runs and how much farther we need to go to eradicate it. And it was the art backgrounding that reckoning – brilliant records from Moor Mother and Backxwash and Danny Denial and Black Ends and Anjimile and SAULT – that largely helped to drive that point home in a horrifyingly visceral fashion.
Pink Siifu, a Birmingham-based artist that’s been responsible for some incredible music this year, has never obscured his confrontational attitude toward white people. The George Floyd protests, as it turns out, happened to coincide with an unseen level of vitriol emergent in his work. The anger that runs through NEGRO is primal and palpable, but the circumstances surrounding its release incentivized listeners who would normally find themselves put off by such abrasion to submit themselves to Siifu’s seething. The saxophone squalls that open the record are among the most unapologetically violent music I’ve ever heard, distressing enough to catch the attention of anybody within earshot. From there he bounces between abject depression, brutal assault and discomfiting terror at an alarming pace. It’s cohesive, but cohesive in the way a nightmare has its own sense of logic. Furthermore, though Siifu means his words, there’s also his artistic license at play that heightens their power. The collagist structure, the boiling production, the occasional lapses into serenity (especially toward the end); Siifu demonstrates a knack for making aesthetic decisions that would foreshadow his calmer work on FlySiifu’s the new Avalanches record.
At its heart NEGRO plays like a hardcore punk record, both explicitly confrontational and true to the self. “Punk” music in Western culture has never been allowed to be truly Black because our idea of punk (the marketable idea, at least) lies in challenging a specific paradigm via a specific set of parameters. Our idea of punk has long consisted of a bunch of snotty teenagers to rage about girl troubles and taking drugs. Railing against legit institutions, especially those that challenge the economic status quo, make for less marketable music by definition. That’s perhaps more the end result of industry-fueled dilution than a conscious elision, but the music industry literally originated around the exploitation of Black people.
The funny thing about this year is how much of a firebomb the summer felt only for it to cool down, as it always does, in the exhaustion of the election and the pandemic. It seems as though our memories remain as shallow as ever. Is this why older people get so cynical? That these seemingly world-shattering events get lost in the mix until its hard imagining that anything will ever change? And so therefore we don’t? The fact that so many reputable magazines are posting year-end lists that, in part, valiantly attempt to address how 2020 became an active volcano of racial tension but fail handily (I love SAULT, but really? Platitudinous dance music as an encapsulation of a year in which so little has been fixed?) tells you everything you need to know.
My hope is that this decade will see a rebirth of punk as an explicitly Black endeavor. In that future, NEGRO would function as a Fun House of sorts, providing legions of young creatives to evoke its sense of righteous anger, if not for pure catharsis, then in pursuit of a more equitable future. For now, I remain astounded by Pink Siifu’s imagination and willingness to lay down the ugliest parts of his psyche. There’s maybe not a tight resolution to the record’s squall, and it’s certainly a little too monomaniacal to hit everyone equally, but to my non-comprehensive mind it best represents the tumult of the year and how, at its end, so much more needs to be fixed. FlySiifu’s might be the easier listen, but this is nihilistic pit of nails I dive into again and again.
Redveil – Niagara
Who actually knows why people start to take off in this business? Do any quick research on what to do to earn a following and some enterprising blog writer or music industry insider will give you the play-by-play in detailed instructions. Yet just like a thousand cannily-advertised fad diets can’t replace calorie counting and exercise, success as a musician always comes down to hard work and luck. Assuming you’re aiming for a career, when you roll those dice, you’re likely committing to a life of working way too hard for way too little until some planets align and your industriousness finally starts to pay off. All that hard work, however, will prepare you for an audience. Going viral is incredibly enticing for anybody hoping to make it in the arts, but it carries with it its own sense of challenges that only the youngest generations are now starting to understand.
According to the rapper himself, Redveil earned about 800 streams on Spotify in 2019, the year he released his moody debut record. Then in August he released Niagara and promptly saw his star catapult upward. Word spread about the precocious teenager and his killer record, still one of the most economical releases I’ve head this year. He found himself wrapped up in the discourse surrounding “experimental rap,” suddenly in the same echelon with notable underground artists like MIKE and Navy Blue. Most notably, he earned the wrath of Anthony Fantano, whose irascibility led to a puzzling beef that helped the rapper achieve even further notoriety. By the end fo the year, Redveil went from 800 streams to just over 2,600,000, a promising start to an artist who comes across as ready to tackle his newfound, if still small, platform.
The best part about Redveil’s success is that the work really does justify it. Niagara’s been in my repeated listens since it released; it’s a great surprise that it holds up so well months afterward. I still get floored by how confident this guy comes off, both as a rapper and as a songwriter. The guitar lick that kicks off “Campbell” feels like a small nod to Some Rap Songs’ closing track, as if knowingly continuing the conversation. But it also shares that record’s expediency, zooming through smooth silky beats that feel like they come off the top of the head. There’s something so effortless about how this record is constructed, as if Redveil were simply breathing instead of painstakingly lining up tracks on the DAW like any of us. Sure, it’s a little derivative of that “experimental rap” sound, but who cares when the results are so consistently enjoyable?
Róisín Murphy – Róisín Machine
It still blows my mind,that disco emerged as a chief motif in some of the year’s best pop music. Disco’s supremacy in the mid-to-late ‘70s engendered clubs rife with stacked bodies, illicit drug use and liberating sexual encounters; musically, not only were its string-laden arrangements expensive to produce, but its focus on physicality really only made sense in a public space. Yet in a year of shuttered clubs and social distancing, people were buying up roller skates and living the new American pastime: chasing a fantastical version of an exotic past.
Dua Lipa may have laid claim to a spot at the top of the pecking order with Future Nostalgia, and Doja Cat may have crossed over from memelord to actual superstar in the technicolor “Say So,” but there’s really two disco-inflected records I couldn’t stop playing the moment they entered my life.
One introduced me – as it perhaps did many people – to an Irish avant-pop singer-songwriter with a discography spanning over fifteen years. Róisín Murphy isn’t nearly as well-known states-wide as David Bowie, but she certainly comes as close to his chameleonic persona as anybody I’ve followed since. But Róisín Machine isn’t just a kismet pairing of style with currentness. It’s just a wonderfully strange record with a peculiar internal logic that only gets stronger with repeat listens. That’s important, because at first the early pairing of “Kingdom of Ends” and “Something More,” two relatively languid songs that nonetheless achieve some hefty thematic lifting, are still in danger of dropping its audience’s attention toward something flashier.
But your patience is rewarded with rich forays into the liberating forces that form the exoskeleton of disco. Who hasn’t, as the main character does on “Shellfish Mademoiselle,” longed to escape their confines on the dance floor? Who hasn’t felt that inner voice chaining them to a low-risk life defined by complacency, as on “Incapable”? Who hasn’t taken a chance on heartbreak, as she does on “Murphy’s Law?” Who among us hasn’t wanted “Something More”?
As Murphy posits these universal queries, the pathos of her music fills in the cracks, inviting us to push ourselves past our limitations. This is intoxicating music, but it’s not easy listening. Instead, its a fully-realized examination of the potential that disco once offered, and even if it’s more cerebral than its common source material, it still gets the job done brilliantly. Simple pleasures with a smart edge: that’s perhaps the perfect recipe for great pop music, and Róisín Machine follows that recipe to a T.
That’s it! Though these were my favorites of the year, there’s still so much music to cover! Stay tuned for TDP’s Best of 2020, coming sometime later this month!
Lives in Seattle, terrible diet, loves music, has hope for people
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