Best of 2019 • Kevin Morby • Oh My God

Across four solo albums (and turns in bands like Woods and the Babies), Kevin Morby has always worn his influences on his sleeve. Or record sleeves if you will: Depending on your Ikea shelf space or online playlists, one might hear throughlines to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Leonard Cohen’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony, the rock-as-savior gestures of Spiritualized and Springsteen. Or maybe you hear Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Randy Newman, and the War on Drugs instead. Depending on the line and moment, Morby can deftly emulate all of the above. The more you appreciate this rock canon, the more likely that Morby hit some of your sweet spots. Even when it came to covering the feral punk of the Germs, Morby found a way to make “Caught in my Eye” sound like a lost Dylan cut. PF

Morby keeps the instrumentation sparse but rich, with horns, harps, piano, organ and backing choirs peppered throughout. His musical erudition is fun, too. “OMG Rock n Roll” taps the ballroom body-moving side of the Velvet Underground, with chugging organs and Morby as soulman, testifying, “Oh my lord, come carry me home.” Other moments bring to mind bliss-chasers from Laura Nyro to the Mamas and the Papas to his fellow Great Plains questers the Flaming Lips. Ultimately, despite its divine themes, the pleasures of Oh My God are pleasantly transitory, less a reckoning with the Almighty than the religious experience of casually browsing a well-stocked used record sale in a church basement. RS

Best of 2019 • Purple Mountains

Best of 2019 • Siskiyou • Not Somewhere

siskiyouband.com

Siskiyou returns from a four-year hiatus with Not Somewhere, an album that finds band leader Colin Huebert (ex-Great Lake Swimmers) essentially in solo artist mode, writing and self-recording this new collection of tunes on his own, playing all the guitar, bass, keyboard and drum parts himself. Not Somewhere harkens back to Siskiyou’s magical and understated 2010 self-titled debut in this and other ways: the album’s production rekindles a homespun intimacy, where plain-spoken lyrics grapple with portraits of quiet quotidian despair, fragile existential horizon lines separating perseverance and defeatism, honest and unremarkable lives trapped in cultures of false consciousness, impossible desire, self-analysis and self-medication. CR

Though Huebert evidences stewing in his own juices a bit too long a’la Syd Barrett, the music takes a shaggier turn.  ‘The End II/Song of Joy’ in all its acoustic majesty jumps straight from the softer moments of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.  While the anthemic build of ‘Unreal Erections/Severed Heads’ adds in stately horns at the end to elevate the song over its subject of being “22nd Century poor”.  Several years on from its recording Huebert was not only prescient at the time, but he would also likely be more disgusted today with humanity’s further surrender to technology.  If the album has a signature song, it's most likely ‘Nothing Disease’, though the song’s lovely chorus overcomes the pathos of the song.  Even the ragged shamble of ‘Her Aim Is Tall’ has a tuneful thread to it. SBlab

Best of 2019 • H-burns • Midlife

Following Night Moves and Kids We Own The Summer and its harmonious keyboards, H-Burns goes back to the quintessence of his music style: an impeccable songwriting praised internationally and an interpretation undeniably precise. To narrate in one album the only two stories worth being narrated – the one about a man living his home, and the one about a man coming back to his home – H-Burns (aka Renaud Brustlein) first matured his project isolated in a home-studio owned by French underground collective La Souterraine before bringing it to the studio with a team of musicians and engineers that he meticulously picked as usual : Earl Harvin from Tindersticks on the drums, Kate Stables from This Is The Kit as a vocal guest, Noah Georgeson (The Strokes, Andy Shauf, etc.) for the mixing, etc. Understandably title Midlife this new album recorded on analog tapes tells the story of a man who looks back over the journey of his life, remembering his dreams of glory, the lost love stories, what he left behind from the others and from himself. RT

www.h-burns.com/site/en/home/

Cette fois-ci, H-Burns a décidé d’explorer le thème de la crise de la quarantaine et ce qui signifie qu’il revient plus cru et plus brut qu’auparavant. Et pour ce faire, il n’a pas fait appel à Rob Schnapf pour la production mais a recours à l’autoproduction (sans pour autant négliger l’aide de Stuart Staples de Tindersticks). On sent tout de suite la différence lorsque l’on écoute des titres soutenus comme « Tigress » et « Actress » aux influences indie folk US bien prononcées ou bien même des moments plus rythmés et enlevés comme « Crazy Ones » tant les arrangements sobres sont soignés aux petits oignons avec sa basse rythmique épurée. los

Best of 2019 • Tinariwen • Amadjar

There is a hazy expansiveness to Tuareg band Tinariwen’s music that recalls the desert setting in which it was created. Fuzzy guitars are rhythmically picked over undulating rhythms and gravelly baritone vocals; it is almost as if you can hear a sand-laden breeze passing between the mics as the band record.

This is a band that has been in existence, in one form or another, since 1979. Never resorting to cliche, they continue to be just as inspired by the universal themes of love, politics and nature as they always have been. Their musical delivery is just as heartfelt and forceful for it.

Best of 2019 • Ducks Unlimited • "Get Bleak"

“Get Bleak” is a song about this idea that moving somewhere else is going to solve all your problems. It’s something that I’ve heard expressed by a lot of friends in one way or another, especially as more and more people are getting priced out of cities like Toronto, New York and London. There can be plenty of good reasons to leave the place that you’re from or somewhere you’ve made your home for a long time, but I think there’s this ‘grass is always greener’ thing that in my experience, and anecdotally from people I know, just isn’t true. It’s hard to move to a new place, and you’re still going to be you when you get there with the same issues and hang-ups, plus you’re going to miss the people who care about you, and they’re going to miss you.

Best of 2019 • Modern Nature • How to Live

www.modernnature.band

British songwriter Jack Cooper’s former group Ultimate Painting paid tribute to the southern Colorado countercultural artists’ community Drop City, which formed in 1965 and was abandoned to biker gangs by the early 1970s. When Ultimate Painting imploded last year, and Cooper’s new group Modern Nature debuted with an 11-minute piece of cosmic minimalism, one might’ve expected them to dive further into the swirl. But the band’s full-length debut, How To Live, anchored by Cooper and BEAK>’s Will Young, offers a more grounded escape route, blurring ideas of city and country in search of transcendence. Pf

On Modern Nature’s debut album, How to Live, urban and rural cross into each other. Plaintive cello strains melt into motorik beats. Pastoral field recordings drift through looping guitar figures. Rising melodies shine with reflective saxophone accents. Throughout this continuous work, where no song ever really seems to end, there’s an indelible feeling of constant forward motion. It’s as if the band is laying down a railway and riding it simultaneously, and you can hear all kinds of landscapes passing by.

Best of 2019 • Better Oblivion Community Center

Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst team up for a tight-knit folk-rock album about alienation, solitude, and our potential to better ourselves against bad odds.

Best of 2019 • Fontaines D.C. • "Dublin City Sky"

www.fontainesdc.com

The album ends with Dublin City Sky, a lament to the end of a toxic relationship and the fracturing of the city’s bohemian character under the weight of capitalism and gentrification. “It feels very important to explore the dying culture that’s being murdered by gentrification,” Chatten says. “It’s casting a shadow on what we love about the city and that gives us the impetus to write about what’s in that shadow.”

Deegan adds: “The increase of tech companies here, all of the capitalist stuff going on in Dublin right now, the focus on money over quality of life or art, is why gentrification is a given now. I think romantic Ireland is dead and gone.”

Best of 2019 • wished bone • Sap Season

I usually write something resembling a song every day. I don't work on a farm at the moment but do have an edible garden at my house, as well as orange, lemon, grapefruit, fig, peach and nectarine trees. Music is the most freeing thing i've ever felt. The first tier of freeness happens when I write the words down, the second when i put them to music, the third - recording and releasing them. and then each time I perform them another little piece of memory or sadness is released again. It branches out in infinite dimensions to where, finally, at the end of it all, I begin to feel peace with reality.

Wished Bone is the recording project of LA-via-Ohio musician and plant biologist turned bartender Ashley Rhodus. She calls her songs “dark twee”; The Fader's take is “unhurried, comforting indie-rock with an edge.” Following her full-length debut in 2018, she returns with the self-released Sap Season, a collection of warm and modest stories embracing the ephemeral and ordinary details in life. Produced by Phil Hartunian, with contributions from instrumentalist Wandering Lake.

I’m not gonna lie, I was tempted to put a click-bait title on this album review. Why? Well, I’m used to straightforward femme-centered indie rock being sad, and the vibe off the bat with Wished Bone is usually sunny. Warm guitars and airy, conversational vocals make a statement that’s unusually pleasant in sound for a song titled “Hold Me.”

Best of 2019 • The Stroppies • 'Cellophane Car'

From across the world, Melbourne, Australia seems like a city filled with youthful bands breathing new life into old formulas of melodic guitar-pop. Each of the last few years, the number of great bands coming out of Australia, especially Melbourne, has steadily impressed. The Stroppies' self-titled 2017 EP was a great rough-around-the-edges work of experimental pop, with an air of Flying Nun Records to it. Whoosh! is comparatively next-level -- anthemic and multi-layered yet still driven by a loose DIY impulse. The voices of Gus Lord and Claudia Serfaty alternate, overlap and complement each other, as the instruments do much the same. Theirs is a comfortable, familiar-in-a-good-way sound that also feels fresh and exciting. PM

Best of 2019 • Julien Baker • "The Modern Leper"

Undoubtedly the highlight on the Tiny Changes Frightened Rabbit tribute album—a record that was almost finished before lead singer Scott Hutchison’s tragic death and one that took on a completely different meaning by the time of its release about a year later—Julien Baker slows down the Midnight Organ Fight album opener, turning the upbeat rock song into something much more her own. Beginning with the guitar atmospherics that dot the entirety of her own material, it proceeds to build to a huge crescendo, only to completely lose almost all the instrumentals for the final chorus. Where the original’s finale seems hopeful that maybe, just maybe, Hutchison’s ex will give him one more chance (“You should sit with me and we’ll start again / And you can tell me all about what you did today”), Baker’s version knows the answer and you can hear it in her voice, distant and longing. —Steven Edelstone

Best of 2019 • Florist • Emily Alone

The previous two albums from her indie-pop outfit Florist were full-band affairs, but in these 12 songs, Sprague steps away from her collaborators for a spell, tasked with filling time alone. It’s a familiar reprieve for the Los Angeles-based artist, who has also released several excellent ambient collections under her own name. But while those long-form compositions have evoked solitude and the natural world using modular synthesizers, Emily Alone is built from simpler tools: double-tracked vocals, acoustic guitar, and the occasional birdsong leaking in from an open window. PF

She wrote every song on the album, played every instrument on the album, produced the album, and even did most of the album’s mixing. Sprague releases ambient music under her own name, but she’s releasing Emily Alone as a Florist album. So that album title is a simple truth. You should not go into Emily Alone expecting to hear the work of Florist, the band whose past two albums you may have enjoyed. That’s not this. This is something else. SG

Best of 2019 • Bill Callahan • Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest

The voice murmuring in our ear, with shaggy-dog and other kinds of stories, is an old friend so fine to hear from again. Bill’s gentle, spacey take on folk and roots music is like no other; scraps of imagery, melody and instrumentation tumble suddenly together in moments of true human encounter.

I never thought I’d make it this far

Little old house, recent model car

And I’ve got the woman of my dreams

And an imitation Eames

And I signed Willie’s guitar!

He sang, Hey good lookin’ whatcha got cookin’

And I signed Willie’s guitar

When he wasn’t looking!

The idea of communal befuddlement and communal peace has been present in Callahan’s discography for a while. For me, hearing him and his wife sing “Lonesome Valley” as a duet, their voices never quite melding, but each nonetheless lifting the other, is a moving argument for partnership as a guiding, palliative force—a way to keep on, alone, together. TNY

Best of 2019 • Boy Scouts • Free Company

boyscoutsband.com

Free Company is an album I wish I’d had last autumn. Taylor Vick, an Oakland songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who performs as Boy Scouts, has made a generous and gorgeously empathetic chronicle of the aftermath of love. Through sunny arrangements and spare songwriting, Vick compresses the dust of her romantic disappointment into a glittering jewel. She loves the subject of her songs, but she loves herself, too—loves herself more, enough to step away and carry on, alone, with her head held high. PF

Best of 2019 • Big Thief • "The Toy"

https://bigthief.net

What a fool, familiar dream

I wake up laughing and running

From the boy crying and coming

'Cause the toy in my hand is real

What a tomb we're building here

In the sphere, that's where we all die

In the eye, that's where I'm living

The toy in my hand is real

In the room, her warm hands play

On my breast, what is she singing?

Her form ringing and ringing

'Cause the toy in my hand is real

The toy in my hand is real

Charcoal, the jet planes purr

In the crew, distant as paper

Children burn, faceless vapor

'Cause the toy in my hand is real

Yes, the toy in my hand is real

Best of 2019 • Field Medic • used 2 be a romantic

“Used 2 Be a Romantic” is the second advance track from Fade Into the Dawn, following its stellar lead single “Henna Tattoo,” which we highlighted as our Daily Dose upon its release. Where “Henna Tattoo” was concerned with the anxiety and uncertainty surrounding a tenuous romantic connection, “Used 2 Be a Romantic” finds Patrick coping with other problems: the everyday stresses of being a touring musician. “I used to be a romantic / now I’m a dude in a laminate,” Patrick laments, looking back on a show gone wrong (“Those fuckers talked over my whole set”). The singer-songwriter resolved to quit drinking while recording his new album, only to return to it halfway through a particularly grueling run of shows, an uphill battle manifested by lines from “Used 2 Be a Romantic” like, “I can’t see shit, I’m blinded by the light / I swore that I quit but I need a drink tonight.” It’s an honest look at how hard and dehumanizing the daily grind can be—a reminder that artists are also just people.



I need a cigarette
Those fuckers talked over my whole set
But I don't have any time to reflect
I gotta sell some shirts to try and make the rent

Best of 2019 • Leonard Cohen • Thanks for the Dance

After the grand farewell of 2016's You Want It Darker, Cohen's son gathers his father's scraps and unfinished ideas and lovingly fleshes them out with help from collaborators like Beck, The National's Bryce Dessner and Feist.

Jay-Z is not the Dylan of Anything

I am the Dylan of anything

I am the Kanye West of Kanye West

The Kanye West

Of the great bogus shift of bullshit culture

From one boutique to another

Cohen famously approached his death with clarity, and Thanks for the Dance honors his late-career habit of seeming to write elegies for himself.

Best of 2019 • THE OCEAN BLUE • Kings and Queens / Knaves and Thieves

https://www.theoceanblue.com/kings-and-queens-knaves-and-thieves

There have always been comparisons to The Smiths, U2, R.E.M, as The Ocean Blue has covered some of their music in the early days. As well, lead singer David Schelzel sounds a lot like Bernard Sumner. The comparisons should end here as over the years, they have evolved, and in a way improved upon, their dreamy/jazzy/jangly sound. They now are a tight indie pop outfit. If one did not know their history, they would think that this is an unknown gem band whose songs are enjoyable on repeat.

Best of 2019 • This Is​.​.​.​Tunng - Magpie Bites and Other Cuts

tunng.co.uk

"Heatwave" is the first track from the compilation to be shared. It was originally released as a bonus 7” included with deluxe version of last year's album. Tunng co-founder Mike Lindsay says that "Heatwave" was "written on one hot and sticky morning whilst working on what would become Songs You Make at Night. It gleefully wrote itself while Sam (Genders, co-founder) was dancing around the mixing desk."