The 2020 end of year music lists thread

it's a live album, no?

Yeah, recorded at the Blue Note in NYC right before the city shut down in March. I was actually supposed to go to one of the shows but bailed.

the 1975 play explicitly with pop artifice and they are meta as hell tbh, i can see how this might grate but calling them polite misses the point a bit

― imago, Thursday, December 10, 2020 6:44 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

So imitating songs that used to be played on Apple commercials so that those songs can be played on Apple commercials is the new 'meta'?

Maybe polite is too polite a term. I should have gone with 'fucking boring'.

just my own personal hang-up but generally speaking I greatly prefer jazz with zero singing or spoken-word stuff. any of the records on your list fit that bill, unperson?

just my own personal hang-up

This holds true for many, perhaps even most of us tbf.

Thought the Makaya McCraven Gil Scott-Heron re-imagining would get more love. Made the Line of Best Fit list, which is worth a browse. They also rated Samia's The Baby at #2, a really good coming-of-age indie debut with lots of hooks and sardonic lyrics; riyl: Phoebe Bridgers, Nilufer Yanya, Soccer Mommy, etc.

https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/articles/best-albums-2020-ranked

just my own personal hang-up but generally speaking I greatly prefer jazz with zero singing or spoken-word stuff. any of the records on your list fit that bill, unperson?

James Brandon Lewis Quartet, Black Art Jazz Collective, Aaron Diehl, and Matthew Shipp Trio. And there's only singing on two tracks from the Ambrose Akinmusire, so don't skip that one. (I'm generally anti-vocals myself, it just worked out that a lot of the records I liked this year had them.)

Many xposts: My own personal hangup with the 1975 is the vocal production. The first song I heard by them was "If You're Too Shy," where the first thing you notice are the vocals running through a resonating filter (aka vocoder with one key held down), and I thought "Oh that's a nice use of that effect!" But I feel like at least half of their other songs that I've checked out since then have the same effect on the vocals, and it just wearies me.

the 1975 are just not my thing.. love if it we made it” is awesome, though, it reminds me of Tears for Fears.

“Love it if we made it”, whatever

haven't paid that much attention to them, but I really love that song

"Love it if we made it" towers above everything else they've done for me. I find the immeasurable love bestowed upon them by ILM a bit baffling but I'd personally consider that one as a top 50 song of the 2010s. If we're only talking about 2010's pop rock then it's a top 10 easily for me.

I do love the idea of The 1975 and their no-fucks-given vibe... if more 'rock' bands weren't as self-conscious to release a song like TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME perhaps rock wouldn't have died decades ago.

Weird 1975 posts in this thread that seem willfully misreading them, their appeal, their history, etc

the 1975 and taylor swift are the two ILM tentpole pop acts that I just don't get and at this point, don't really care to anymore. I just brace for them to have multiple tracks crowd out stuff I like better in the EOY polls. :/

I don’t know if I’m misreading them but they certainly have the looks of rock band even if they don’t sound like one. I don’t care enough about them to learn their about them. I was just going for what meets the eye.

Fuck missed a few words... I’m falling asleep

Yes, after my nasty post about them yesterday, I decided that having people condescend to me about what I'm hearing in their tracks doesn't really bother me. Enjoy the milquetoast pop music.

Condescension Is In The Eye Of The Beholder (And I Feel Fine)

- Matthew Healy

wow someone is being very condescending towards milquetoast pop music

Another #1 for Sault. Fun list with lots to explore. Love the Shinichi Atobe, Jon Collin & Demdike Stare and KMRU albums, meself.

https://thevinylfactory.com/features/best-albums-of-2020/

I like the look of that one

Paste's 50 Best Songs of 2020:
https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/best-songs/best-songs-of-2020/

^^ is this the first one with empty country on it?

ILXORs are doing it for ourselves: ILM's 2020 End of Year Tracks & Albums Poll / NOMINATIONS THREAD

Vinyl factory and Paste lists are very good!

When does RESIDENT ADVISOR rolls theirs? I love their lists. Is there other website promoting music similar to them?

Piccadilly Records still doing their beardo/indie thing: https://www.piccadillyrecords.com/counter/feature.php?feature=1024

More UK Jazz this year, and apparently Sebastien Tellier released an album?

I thought the NME would be the first place to have The 1975 really high after having the last two albums as their number ones, but it just scrapes the list.

https://www.nme.com/features/nme-best-albums-of-the-year-2020-2835612

When does RESIDENT ADVISOR rolls theirs? I love their lists. Is there other website promoting music similar to them?

Last year they published their EOY albums on the 10th, tracks on the 11th and mixes on the 12th, so it shouldn't be long.

As for your second question, I don't know, but I too would like to find out.

xlr8r is the most prominent other website i can think of that's in a similar lane to RA

Oh cool their latest edition features a history of the Romanian electronic scene. Sold.

fact kinda sorta

mixmag

https://daily.bandcamp.com/best-of-2020/farewell-to-ranked-lists

When you assign something as hard-coded as numerical rankings to works of art, you start moving out of the realm of subjectivity, and into the realm of codifying taste. But that approach is doomed to failure, because creating objective metrics is not the goal of the critic. What’s interesting about criticism isn’t the Final Judgment—it’s not the numerical score or number of stars. What’s interesting about criticism is the argument. But, if all you’re arguing about is whether or not something deserved to be 17 instead of 27, you’re not really arguing about the substance of the art at that point—you’re arguing about numbers.

Good on them. I just can't do weighted lists anymore, or only up to a point.

completely agree but i understand that a certain spectrum of the spectrum NEEDS that codification to satisfy the demons

I like their thinking too. My Stereogum jazz list was numbered, but all the albums on it were equally good, and I chose them to make a specific collective statement about jazz in 2020. The numbers were close to arbitrary.

Speaking of which, I haven't been keeping up with Matthew Shipp, but good call on The Unidentifiable, I really enjoyed it.

i hope fact are still doing a list this year despite having cut waaaaay back this year, their lists were always endearingly contrarian

yeah FACT always left me scratching my head in good way.

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/2020-readers-poll-results/

So p4k readers really like BTS and Taylor Swift. Or it’s a non-reader brigade.

lol yeah I saw that and it looks fully gamed to me, I wonder why anyone bothers doing online polls anymore

Everybody knows democracy is rigged in 2020.

Jeff Rosenstock defeats Dogleg at last.

Alex Ross's notable performances and recordings of 2020:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2020-in-review/notable-performances-and-recordings-of-2020

Props to him for including the Liza Lim and Timothy McCormack.

I think those Pitchfork reader poll results are actually pretty good (notwithstanding that one “contains multitudes” of folklore tracks).

just came here to post that Bandcamp article

Sound Opinions:
https://www.soundopinions.org/show/785

Greg Kot:

1. SAULT, Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise)
2. Run the Jewels, RTJ4
3. Melkbelly, Pith
4. Angelica Garcia, Cha Cha Palace
5. Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
6. Bartees Strange, Live Forever
7. Coriky, Coriky
8. IDLES, Ultra Mono
9.Porridge Radio, Every Bad
10. Jyoti, Mama, You Can Bet!
11. Lydia Loveless, Daughter
12. Ganser, Just Look at That Sky
13. Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways
14. Nubya Garcia, Source
15. Jay Electronica, A Written Testimony
16. Jason Isbell, Reunions
17. Beach Bunny, Honeymoon
18. Lil Uzi Vert, Eternal Atake
19. Margo Price, That’s How Rumors Get Started
20. Cornershop, England is a Garden

Jim DeRogatis:

1. Shemekia Copeland, Uncivil War
2. Ganser, Just Look at That Sky
3. Angelica Garcia, Cha Cha Palace
4. Jason Isbell, Reunions
5. Run the Jewels, RTJ4
6. Lucinda Williams, Good Souls Better Angels
7. Drive-By Truckers, The Unraveling
8. Margo Price, That’s How Rumors Get Started
9. Lydia Loveless, Daughter
10. SAULT, Untitled (Black Is)/ Untitled (Rise)
11. Idles, Ultra Mono
12. Bob Mould, Blue Hearts
13. Soccer Mommy, color theory
14. Steve Earle, Ghosts of West Virginia
15. Melkbelly, Pith
16. Dua Lipa, Future Nostalgia
17. Wire, Mind Hive
18. U.S. Girls, Heavy Light
19. Shabazz Palaces, The Don of Diamond Dreams
20. Bette Smith, The Good The Bad The Bette

Thanks for the Alex Ross list. I'm listening to Meadow now. It's definitely connecting.

This review is hilarious: https://www.ulyssesarts.com/the-ua-blog/lcms-out-of-silence-meadow

The first ...out of silence release is Meadow, by Linda Catlin Smith, who was born in New York but has long been resident in Canada. Perhaps her music required a move away, a quieter environment, a different pace, another view.

It is not city music. Rather, in its tuning and in its atmosphere, it suggests natural landscapes.

No doubt this is why she has spent the last 40 years in the city of Toronto.

lol!

I'm sure she spent that whole time hunting and chopping wood by her log cabin out in *checks notes* the fourth biggest North American city, population-wise, after Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles.

15 Québécois highlights according to Le Devoir (warning: the article is in French, although not all the albums they cite are francophone):

https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/musique/591430/1-notre-dame-des-sept-douleurs-klo-pelgag

URL is quite the spoiler, heh.

https://thequietus.com/articles/29370-the-quietus-top-100-tracks-of-the-year-2020