ILM's Top 77 Tracks of 2019

xps thx ulysses

pure visceral loathing for that VW song ugh

The Starry Night video is simply sumptuous!

Blanck Mass is also pretty hype

I am not used to actually liking the dance selections in the countdown, what is happening

djp you should hear that kris baha record that karl recommended me upthread

i am also voting for 12 on thursday and 12 on friday; i can help with rollout if that's useful moka. but your call!

Blanck Mass album was sooooo gooooood

Preferred "Han Pan" though

somehow missed this. thought it was 'han jan' but with a typo, but no, it's a totally different song lol

1 - 24 Th

we should let this marinate a lil, imo. maybe 12 a day on Th and F?

― culture of mayordom (voodoo chili)

15 maybe?

1-15 Th
16 - 31 Wd
32-55 Tu

Maybe I can go all the way to 53 today which is the less busy day of the week for me. So we do 24 tracks today, 20 tomorrow and 15 the following days.

Really digging Me vs Us. New to me and it's lovely.

I only voted for one Rosalía song and sadly Aute Cuture was not it. I hope this is the first of many singles of hers to place.

the Weyes Blood is very lovely, but yeah there is something idk imposing or overly grandiose about Titanic Rising that I've had trouble getting past

I like that breakdown xps

To 53 would be 25 today

I think the following song is the first song from my ballot to appear so far so be kind to it. Also she's great live.

https://i.imgur.com/QJPuMK6.jpg
59: Charlotte Adigéry - “High Lights” - 181 points - 6 votes - 1 number 1 vote
video
Charlotte Adigéry (Adigery)

‘Highlights’ is a rocking meditation on black woman hair and deserves to be an anthem imo ― Fuck the NRA (ulysses)

YES

i love this goddamn song

I'm all for Moka posting things on the most convenient schedule :)

And now my #3! Amazing discovery, ty CAAL

titanic rising kinda lost me as an album over the year but the individual moments are still stunning

― american bradass (BradNelson), Monday, January 27, 2020 10:44 AM

Captures my thoughts perfectly. There's a track from it on my songs ballot, but it totally missed my albums ballot.

Man! All my favorites appearing.

"Starry Night" was my favorite pop house jam of 2019.

I had the most luck recommending Adigéry's EP to skeptics more than any other album last year.

Could have easily voted for any song from Zandoli - went with a different cut in the end.

I'm all for Moka posting things on the most convenient schedule :)

― babu frik fan account (mh)

To 53 would be 25 today

― opden gnash (imago)

Yeah sorry!

Wait so tomorrow would be 32 -52? I don't know my math is all wrong at the moment hahaha I'm doing the rollout and the missing designs right now so my mind is a bit all over the place.

It's so weird and assured and cool

― imago, Wednesday, 8 January 2020 22:23 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

add to this anthemic, impossible to get out of one's head and genuinely fresh-sounding in how it's put together - the production is, subtly, wild. and the 'no home no phone no car no bed' bridge is devastating

i'm nobody
i'm nobody
i'm nobody

additionally: it's real funky

whole ep is really amazing though jeff w otm

truly one to unite us all. yeah I voted for the EP too

most out-there fact of all: she met the producer on Tinder

I've only just spotted there's a 17 minute thing by Charlotte called "Yin Yang Self-Meditation" on Spotify. Anyone tried that?

Voted for different Rosalia, Vampire Weekend, and Weyes Blood songs but would stan for just about everything the three put out in 2019

went for a different charlotte track which i hope places

https://i.imgur.com/SG6j0Sj.jpg
58: Shura - “BKLYNLDN - 186 points - 6 votes
video
Peggy Gou

The Singles Jukebox

This is an emergency,” murmurs Shura, before an ascendant orchestral flourish that moves with the same giddiness as does that avalanche of heart-shaped eye emojis when someone decides to respond flirtatiously to your Instagram story. When you’re deep in the nucleus of that kind of desire even the smallest things, like sending or receiving a picture, can enliven the most upending tension. “BKLYNLDN” considers a romance that’s transcontinental, a subject at the centre of 2004’s Before Sunset, probably my favourite film. …Sunrise and …Midnight have things to say about these matters too, of course, but it’s …Sunset that is flooded with the most portent, where two people pregnant with vulnerabilities and infatuation are only willing to release them at the last possible moment, at a point where the somersaults in their stomachs finally become too unbearable. We as viewers aren’t privy to the fireworks that must have ensued after that Nina Simone song ended and the credits rolled, but Shura’s coda serves as the most satisfying form of fan-fiction. (Queer as hell, of course, in adherence to fan-fiction tradition). There, amongst rocketing squawks that’ll make your whole body shiver if you’re not careful, is where all of that restlessness gives way to delirium, where the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred in the most ecstatic way. - William John

“In New York,” an Australian trendspotter once reported, “Thousands of bearded hipsters scamper around Williamsburg or Brooklyn reading Kerouac and drinking whisky.” It’s the kind of geographical goof that comes of imagining places as fashionable synechdoches, and while Shura’s pairing of the borough of Brooklyn and the metropolis of London isn’t quite an error, it seems forced; a foreigner fascinated with the exotics of specificity. (Most of us would say “New York to London” — or, if we were thinking transport — fly out of LaGuardia or JFK, both in Queens. And wouldn’t “Brooklyn to Brixton” hold alliterative appeal? Will there be a sequel, “Staten to Swindon”?) “BKLYNLDN” maintains its languor and, as Shura songs often do, sounds like an Instagram filter, which was a bit more charming when I still used Instagram filters. The tourist really jumps out in the coda, which is sunny and blissful like the first day on vacation. “We could take the subway,” Shura suggests, her cool slipping away. “To the beach!” It’s like a Big Apple version of Lizzie McGuire’s adventures in Rome in The Lizzie McGuire Movie.  - Jonathan Bradley

Oops linked to the peggy gou thread, it's this one:
shura

damn, never heard the charlotte track (or any tracks by her) and i immediately added all of it to my list. what a song.

oh well i imagine many people will complain about this shura track but boy do i love it + the album

tender gay slow jams forevher

Ah shit, where were people talking about High Lights this year? Never heard of it before, and I'm really into it. Love those synthy lines.

xxp What's to complain about? Amazing song and "The Stage" is even better. I voted for the album though.

we can take the subway to the beach where there's a breeze, cuz we're in america! oh yeah!

this track was prob one of my most powerful listening experiences of the year but yeah i ended up just voting for the album

https://i.imgur.com/byGOyVm.jpg
57: Big Thief - “Cattails” - 191 points - 7 votes
video
Big Thief - U.F.O.F. (May 3, 2019)

The Singles Jukebox

At their best, Big Thief’s songs sound like incantations that run on memory, using looping structures and riffs to achieve symbolic power that goes beyond the simple cores that Adrianne Lenker writes. “Cattails” finds Big Thief deep in their own territory, sounding (like many of the songs on U.F.O.F.) like an organic expansion on Lenker’s solo material. It’s insular yet welcoming, a cascade of acoustic guitars that doesn’t quite resolve but instead ends on a question mark, leading you further down into Big Thief’s wilderness. - Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

It’s fascinating how close to the line between hypnosis and tedium this treads. What breaks it free on the right side of the line, for me, isn’t even the more obvious sonic changes towards the end (although those are also well done, if not as sharp as similar transformations you can find in, say, Sam Amidon’s work); there’s something about the guitar line and those basic drums and of course Lenker’s steady narrative that becomes spellbinding, no less because it feels like it easily could have gone the other way. - Ian Mathers

i assume this is... not the last we'll see of big thief

I see what u did there

I was going to say I didn't vote for this, preferring a couple other Big Thief tracks, but nope, I voted for this one as well! Fantastic track.

Cool bit of trivia about this track:

When the band thought they were rehearsing the single “Cattails,” a jaunty ode to making peace with feeling infinitesimal that Lenker had finished that morning, Monks secretly began recording them, and that’s what you hear on U.F.O.F. “We walked into the control room and it was captured, that was it,” she says. “We didn’t have to work at it at all.”

(from: https://www.stereogum.com/featured/big-thief-two-hands-ufof-interview/)

I went with the Adigéry EP instead, but very happy to see High Lights place. Weyes Blood doing even more ethereal and sublime work than usual, but every track was like 10/10 so again just had to vote for the album instead.

love U.F.O.F. so much, my big find of 2019 thanks to ILX and the radio station I do a show at, which had both records on rotation for most of the year