TDP’s FAVORITES OF 2021!

It’s the end of a year once again! While it wasn’t as hellish a ride as 2020, 2021 was still a year spent entirely within a pandemic, and the stressful circumstances of the previous year had settled into a consistent thrum of anxious energy. There were a great deal of releases I heavily enjoyed, but for this list, I wanted to narrow down that deal into an encapsulation of what made my year. This year, I have eight. Check them out (in alphabetical order) below!

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ANIMALES DE PODER – AUGURA

2021 was partly defined by how many Latin-based acts that swept me off my feet. Early in the year I was dumbstruck by the bold left turn of Maria Arnal y Marcel Bages’ CLAMOR, as I was for Natalia Lafourcade’s second volume of Un Canto por Mexico and (though it might not count) Helado Negro’s Far In. Attending Freakout Fest last month introduced me to a bunch of amazing Mexican and Columbian bands, not the least of which included the sensual Petite Amie and the searing Margaritas Podridas. It seemed there was one constant throughout it all though, and it was that I kept coming back to this Uruguayan band’s brilliant debut.

One aspect linking all of the entries on this list is how each bears some melange of elements forming something as close to magic as music can get. For Augura, it’s the combination of crystalline guitar, fey vocals and the stillness of silence. The trio’s interpretation of candombe, a rhythm-based style of music central to Uruguay, into more modern terms partly represents what’s happening in that country alongside vital voices like Fabrizio Rossi. But there’s something else entirely I get out of this record in particular: the affecting quality of its melodies, and the transportive nature of its atmosphere.

Its opening moments are prayer-like and its closing ones are hymnal and haunting, fading into the background and staying there like ineradicable statues. In the middle we get the multi-part “Animales de Poder,” the breezy “Palmas,” the nostalgically-charged “Lunar” and the stoic “Caduca,” each passing by like snapshots in time. Embedded inside the record is a deep appreciation for humanity and its ability to commune and survive in the wake of tragedy. The fallout of environmental catastrophe in “Animales de Poder” foregrounds the reminisces and tales that follow, and the ghosts of the final track observe that flow of time like swaying trees on a beach. The record is pure poetry on multiple fronts and an enormous success that, even by the bitter cold of year’s end, I couldn’t put down completely.

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CORAL GRIEF – CORAL GRIEF EP

I cover a good deal of Seattle-based music on this blog. Maybe not as much as I potentially could, but a lot, you know? I like knowing that there are people cranking out great music where I live, and 2021 held its fair share of Seattle offerings. If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know I fell particularly hard for:

–Antonioni’s debut LP turned swan song
–Dusty’s sudden finale
–Left at London’s eclectic t.i.a.p.f.y.h.
–J.C.R.G.’s apocalyptic Ajo Sunshine
–Iffin’s brittle art rock
–Mt. Fog’s mycelial musings

The list goes on. But I also have to mention releases like Cat Valley’s Feral EP, Fotoform’s Horizons and Wilting’s new self-titled: releases I dug but didn’t cover (though I may well in the future). The hardest part about covering a local scene is the relentless quantity of the output, and though I’ll likely always miss something worth my attention, I’m also always grateful for the ability to listen in the first place.

For this list, I decided to pick just one Seattle-based release that personally stuck with me. Out of all those earned choices, that happens to be Coral Grief’s debut EP, which I discovered through my friend Kay, who also released that cassette on her tape label. The moment I hit play and let “Crumble” wash over me, I felt that familiar gut reaction that maybe I had found something special. By the next track that gut feeling was confirmed. This duo borrow from legions of familiar influences – DIIV, for example, on “Out of the World,” or early Aphex Twin on “Residue” and Stereolab on “Rodeo Radio” – and turns out smart, solid songs built from accomplished playing and a knack for absorbing atmosphere. Lena Farr-Morrissey’s vocals sit at the center but not in front, her words wrapping around Sam Fason’s elliptical guitar lines and dense textures. For an EP the length is pretty substantial, and yet there’s not a truly sour moment throughout.

To support my intuitions, I went to see the couple live recently at the Central Saloon, with Cam Hancock (of The Whags) supporting them on drums. It may have been all the Santas slurping whiskey in the back, but I’d never seen the Saloon that full. That made for an intimidating audience for a band who had literally started this year; you could sense the nerves. By the time they got to the end of the set and hit “Crumble,” half the audience it seemed knew the words and sang them back. I’m glad I’m not the only one who sees something significant going on here, something that given time might blossom into an unstoppable force.

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DRY CLEANING – NEW LONG LEG

Of all the post-punk bands shooting out of the UK like pebbles from a truck tire, I really could’ve chosen any. Most all made the grade for me: Squid’s impenetrable Bright Green Field, black midi’s grandiose Cavalcade, Black Country, New Road’s rollicking For the first time, even IDLES’ Crawler (which was almost ruined for me by overplay). I just figured I had the most plays racked up on this one. Sometimes you have to trust the math.

On first listen, I remember feeling thrilled at how much Dry Cleaning had grown in just two years. Go back and listen to Sweet Princess or Boundary Road Drinks and Snacks and you can see the change, the chucking of certain elements (vocal melody lines, fuzzy alt edges) and the reinforcement of others (streamlined songwriting, mostly). The album format also really did suit them well, because their music is like radiation: the longer it sits with you in one period, the stronger its effects are. Whatever they’ve landed on, it’s a perfect alchemy that requires every single element to work. Tom Dowse’s angular guitar shapes; Florence Shaw’s intoxicatingly quotidian quips; Nick Buxton’s ribcage-like scaffolding and the Lewis Maynard bass lines that lay inside like a heart: it’s hard to imagine what else they could do differently without sounding not only like themselves, but better.

New Long Leg has recognizable roots, of course: spoken-word poetry over music is certainly not a new thing. Neither are the kinds of chords peddled by Gang of Four and Wire ages back, or the very British art of saying something wrapped inside something else. But the songs are simply killer, and they get more powerful the more you internalize the subtle narrative at the core of Shaw’s lyrics. You read the modern manifesto of “Scratchcard Lanyard,” bristle at the the casual misogyny on trial in “Unsmart Lady,” feel the awkward longing underneath “Strong Feelings,” even soften at the gentle poignancy trapped in the Russian cafeteria of “More Big Birds.” No clear answers means you’re free to share in the mysteries as if they were your own. The sound is clearly resonating, if there’s anything to garner from Wet Leg’s recent success and the recent arrival of the band on U.S. television. I can easily imagine this type of music in ads, but even that probably couldn’t rob this music of its peculiarity. 

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L’RAIN – FATIGUE

I’m kicking myself. This record came out in June and I slept on it so hard. I knew I would like it, too – lush neo-soul, experimental sampling, psychedelia, production by the inimitable Slauson Malone? I honestly have no excuse. Maybe I was in the wrong state of mind.

Thank god I’m not anymore though. Those it’s only been about a week since I discovered it, it’s going on this list because I know I’d be just as blown away had I been living with it for months. Fatigue is the kind of record I dreamed of making when I was a little squirt fantasizing about the “extramusical,” but I would’ve never been able to come up with this.  It maybe has six or seven “real” songs, and Taja Cheek (plus her co-producers) curate them with intense care. On “Suck Teeth” she sings with a funk the way Sly Ston originally conceived of the term, as shimmering cascades of synths crash over low-lit harmonies. “Find It” runs a wondrously long and winding journey to a triumphant climax; “Blame Me’s” self-loathing in the wake of familial death is gutting, while the isolation of “Two Face” is perversely, brilliantly revelrous. These songs are unshakable bricks lined with startlingly-modified samples for mortar – the sound of hand claps reversed and scrubbed, speeches and exhortations, discarded takes and silly moments.

Solemn themes lie at the center of its inscrutable cyclone, some about loss and others about accountability. Though a lot of the record is vectored inward, it’s easy to hear the questions Cheek posits coming from within us. Have we changed? Are we to blame? How would others see the way we treat ourselves? Are we prepared for our metamorphoses? There’s a subconscious aspect to the thick swirl of sounds that extend across the record’s length, and their cumulative effect is huge. It’s disturbing, it’s gorgeous, it’s poignant and humorous and grisly and gentle when it desires to be. It’s art.

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LITTLE SIMZ – SOMETIMES I MIGHT BE INTROVERT

This might be the only entry on this list that I expected on it before even listening. I think it was a safe assumption. Anybody who caught Simz’s Grey AREA in 2019 knew she had way more up her sleeve than even what you were witnessing. It was a great record by itself, but she was hungry then and you could tell. More than a talented rapper or an arranger with solid intuition, Simz comes across as a person of unbridled ambition who isn’t afraid to think in grandiose terms, and Sometimes I Might Be Introvert is nothing if not ambitious. That results in some cheesiness – those voiceovers are a prime example – but it also lends the record its world-conquering power. Can’t reach the summit without tripping a few times, right?

It’s worth mentioning the secret weapon at the heart of the matter: insular producer Inflo, whose work with SAULT, Michael Kiwanuka and Cleo Sol has made him the definitive conductor of the recent London Soul movement. He’s essentially responsible for my Song of the Year, the sweeping “Woman.” I remember when Simz dropped the music video and I sat in a cafe feeling chills ripple through me – it felt like a true arrival. I must have replayed that song over a hundred times since it debuted and I’m still not sick of it, because new things jump out at me every time it replays: another stanza to memorize, for instance, or the exquisite bass countermelody underneath those soulful vocal samples. From the curlicues of weed smoke floating through “Two Worlds Apart” to the bouncy electronic funk of “Protect My Energy” and the sweeping melodrama of “I Love You, I Hate You,” his productions are consistently gorgeous and among his best work.

Of course, he’s only half the story. Simz’s flows are also at their apex to wit, and though she plays those lines straight and relatively shallow, the tradeoff is that her storytelling makes a beeline for the heart. Her grand caper, like usual, is turning an album entirely about herself into something that also speaks for many of us. We witness her struggles accepting her truant father in “I Love You, I Hate You,” and relate them with our own histories; in the tenderness of “I See You,” we see reflected in our personal devotions; we absorb her braggadocio from “Point and Kill” and “Fear No Man,” a knockout set of punches that spring up late in the album but add such a burst of momentum it cements it as one of the most consistently brilliant rap releases in quite some time.

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LINGUA IGNOTA – SINNER GET READY

This album ended up being an odd choice for this list, because it gets significantly fewer plays than its peers. This is hard-to-listen-to music, not only because it reminds me of the traumas I’ve endured at the hands of other men but because it reflects back at me the traumas I’ve enacted as a man. It’s quite the raw feeling to feel deeply understood and excoriated at once. But if SINNER GET READY doesn’t get you thinking back on the cycles of harm and hurt that you’ve personally experienced, it might still awe you with the force of its message and the bold creativity at its center.

Kristin Hayter’s third record as Lingua Ignota wasn’t just a jawdropper of a record; it felt intertwined with the harrowing circumstances of her personal life in ways that, like Mount Eerie’s recent albums, occasionally crossed the protective boundaries of art. The last time I listened to this album, it was when I was simultaneously reading her recent encapsulation of her abuse at the hands of Daughters’ Alexis Marshall, and the effect was almost too much to stomach. To engage in someone turning their suffering into music is one thing, but to engage in the minute details of what caused her suffering at the same time is something else entirely. As a record released this year, it thus stands out to me purely because of the visceral reaction it provoked in me, perhaps for reasons outside of its effectiveness as a piece of art.

Instead I can attempt to talk about how it succeeds purely as an execution of Hayter’s artistic vision, and it does, overwhelmingly. Her integration of Pennsylvania’s torrid religious history through organs and strings imbues the record with both a sense of place and a formidable thematic backdrop to her familiar exhortations. While no Lingua Ignota record is an easy play, this one is as gentle as she’s managed. Many of its songs prefer the grandeur of harmony and the sweep of reverb over the harshness of distortion, and while Hayter’s vocals are as lacerating as usual on tracks like “I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASSES,” she’s a more restrained composer here. The dirge-like piano ballads of “PENNSYLVANIA FURNACE” and “PERPETUAL FLAME OF CENTRALIA” pack such a punch in their relatively minimal arrangements. More so than any of her other works, SINNER GET READY propels itself on an invisible gust, a marker of Hayter’s sublime confidence as an artist.

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PARANNOUL – TO SEE THE NEXT PART OF THE DREAM

I, like a few others, got momentarily wrapped up in the “fifth-wave emo” discussion, the court of which was primarily held on social media and thus handled like a wet newspaper with chopsticks. Those that were willing to define what the nascent label meant were often met with accusations of exclusion and ego, even though each individual definition was probably right in its own way. What couldn’t really be argued was the excitement some of this music sparked. Disparate entries like Home Is Where’s incendiary I Became Birds, yourarmsaremycocoon’s self-titled record, and Hey, ILY’s Internet Breath felt sonically unique but borne of the same source, the familiar elements of emo becoming the foundation for myriad, frequently brilliant genre exercises.

Everyone (well, everyone who cares) has their own personal definition of what the pseudo-genre means, and to me there’s a global aspect to it that can’t be ignored, because the Internet’s globalizing impact must be part of it. Though you could argue differently, there weren’t many stronger offerings in that vein than those released by Longinus Recordings, and in particular the surprise breakthrough of a Korean songwriter writing shoegaze-laced emotive rock alone in his bedroom. Months later, To See The Next Part of the Dream is still one of the best rock records I’ve heard this year. Even though it may run a little long its peaks are potent and frequent, and the fact that its made up mostly of VST instruments conversely adds a fitting mid-fi roughness that’s accentuated by its tinniness and red-lined mastering. 

What probably draws me to this and other records of its ilk still is that I don’t speak Korean, because the comprehensive part of my brain that turns on when I hear a language I’m fluent in occasionally mitigates my capacity to enjoy it. If the words are just another instrument, it can augment the whole experience by removing my sense of judgment concerning its lyrics. Perhaps that’s why I’ve noticed the record’s been relatively unpopular among other Korean speakers compared to its largely-Western appreciators, with several noting the fact that Parannoul’s voice isn’t up to snuff. Those saying that are perhaps missing the point. To See The Next Part of the Dream is a lucid, passionate statement whose biggest asset is the lightly-hopeful heart beating at its core. In its extended crescendos and ear-splitting catharses, it achieved what every cloistered, independent music maker really dreams of: a chance to be heard.

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THE WEATHER STATION – IGNORANCE

I think back to how messed up I was in 2020 and how relatively placid this year was. Was it ignorance? Self-care, maybe? Did my brain just give up and go into self-preservation mode? Everything’s about as bad as it was, which is to say maybe it wasn’t all that bad to begin with, or that the fire setting the world ablaze is just imperceptible, invisible as flambéd alcohol. But Tamara Lindemann’s continuation of the full-band treatment that enlivened The Weather Station’s stellar folk songs frequently brought me back to the future. The machinations of romance and heartbreak defined my year more than the climate emergency, and yet on Ignorance they are essentially one and the same.

I didn’t fully understand just what Lindemann was doing in my original review. There I lightly critiqued the concept of writing about the worsening global climate to begin with, thought the logic that any engagement with such an impending doom scenario would be locked in the present tense, futile after modern civilization ceases to exist. Ironically, Lindemann’s characters are locked out of the comfort the present tense affords. A man afraid of love ignores his truer feelings for another (“Tried To Tell You”); appreciation for a picturesque sunset becomes subsumed by its perverse ephemerality (“Atlantic”); people charge through their own lives like bulldozers (“Loss”). Lindemann’s argument was that things have gotten so bad it’s become impossible to look without breaking down, in the process meeting our (and her own) reticence with empathy and understanding where easy answers couldn’t possibly be found.

What’s also stayed with me, of course, is the gorgeousness of the record. One of Lindemann’s biggest strengths is her ability to take classic folk tropes and shade them in vivid colors, like on the pastoral picking of “Came So Easy” or the road-trip barreling of “Thirty.” Here, the opening moments of “Robber,” with its slow build and lilting saxophone, signal a transition into something more complex. The arrangements are dense in a way that support the layers of muted yearning behind Lindemann’s words. “Atlantic” and “Loss” rise and fall in tandem with her repressions, while “Tried To Tell You” never hits the release it promises while its central character stagnates in his romantic woes. There are few greater maneuvers in music where sound matches sentiment, and Ignorance proves that Lindemann does it better than most.