ILM's Top 77 Albums of 2020

I am 5 seconds into this Katie Pruitt album and the guitar alone is giving me a visceral DO NOT WANT reaction.

It's somewhat aggravating that the popular genre I could probably best adapt my voice to is so repellent to me.

I'm less enamored of the album: tonally it's too relentlessly sad. It could be I'm impatient with glum queer drama in 2020-2021.

I love the title track (thanks, Tim!), haven't heard more than that.

xp I too started singing "sometimes I feel like I don't have a PARDNER" when that guitar started but it really doesn't sound like that if you can wait 30 more seconds

woohoo!

I love Katie Pruitt's album, high adolescent drama that resonates with my family's history in numerous ways. and Tim F's comment that every song eventually lifts off like The Lion and the Cobra helped me hear it outside of more immediately obvious frames.

Loved her singles, didn’t check oout the album, sounds great right now

I too started singing "sometimes I feel like I don't have a PARDNER" when that guitar started but it really doesn't sound like that if you can wait 30 more seconds

If it sounded like California skate rock instead of country-pop, I would be on board.

particularly now, virtually everything in that genre sounds like the Klan to me regardless of who is performing it

prejudice against country ain't gonna help if you're trying to get into pruitt; she doesn't really step outside of the genre boundaries neatly. What she does do is sing honestly and cleanly and find some real solid guitar hooks. She sounds incredibly self-assured to me and, while I'm excited about where she's going, where she's at is well worth celebrating too.

transitioning here from the twang to the bleep

https://i.imgur.com/3OakV9R.jpg
#27: Kelly Lee Owens - Inner Song - 391 points - 15 votes

Kelly Lee Owens (2017)

https://kellyleeowens.bandcamp.com/album/inner-song

“If Kelly Lee Owens gently opened the door between dream pop and techno, Inner Song rushes through it and builds a world where ecstatic, curative, untethered electronic sounds abound.”
https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/kelly-lee-owens/inner-song-album-review/

it was very nice for me to receive the gayest country album possible last year xp

i did vote for the kelly lee owens, it slaps!!!

i didn't and it does

I voted for “On” in the songs poll rather than the album, but the whole album is great.

voted for this
it rules

We've had Katie and Kelly back to back but it's probably too much to hope for Kylie at this point

omg kylie minogue is the 78

going through inner song now from the top, which i had not done and arpeggi and on are not very good! love melt, jeanette and flow though; may need to skip around.

Thrilled to see Pruitt so high. It was #4 on my list. An album that I kept in constant rotation throughout the year. It's an earnest, personal, superbly written and constructed debut from a genuinely talented singer that's pushing at the boundaries of popular country in a way that's far more interesting to me than some of the more highly praised female artists from 2020. Love her use of dynamics throughout.

Also voted for KLO. One of the only electronic albums that held my attention the whole way through last year (though Charles Webster was an oversight!). Sounds awesome on headphones, too.

the katie pruitt album is really good even though country had no place in my wheelhouse this year

The concern over retro pastiche is an interesting one to me because I both share it and don’t, which is to say I think it’s an old way of framing a new problem

The new problem is streaming. Thematic playlisting. An endless series of “RIYL” channels, pesudogenres created not because there is some surplus of incredible art that happens to be new disco, but because there’s now a large playlisting platform that popularizes a historical aesthetic with endlessly replenishing new artists who happen to reflect one facet or another of the sound. Think it “future funk” on YouTube, or the popularity of rappers who sound like Griselda. These aren’t genres, they’re not even sub genres; they’re vibes, moods, historical costumes (even if the artists themselves are not)

Richard Brody wrote this abt the year in cinema 2019:

Despite the prominence of a few scattered prestigious titles, what dominates the streaming environment and overwhelms the popularity of any individual movie or show is the popularity of streaming itself—of a given service, whether it’s Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, or another. What’s more, the popularity of streaming is similarly circular: the sheer quantity of what’s streaming also overwhelms the cinematic punditocracy with the sheer quantity of previewing, sifting, recapping, summarizing, comparing, and listing. The need to pay constant attention to the services rather than the works turns critics into connoisseurs of shit, comparing one mediocrity against another in order to be able to assemble a list of what’s barely recommendable with a straight face by contrast with what’s even worse. In the process, critical taste is inevitably shifted toward a new aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) that leaves the best filmmakers of the time looking like backsliding conservatives clinging to ivory-tower traditions rather than what they are: audacious and forward-looking resisters to corporate production, not defenders but advancers of individual creation and conscience who overcome the redefinition of art as content—regardless of how their films may be marketed.

Note that this is both damning of critics blind acceptance of the structure and proliferation of works created by streaming services, but also critical of the contention that “backsliding conservatives clinging to ivory tower traditions” is a fair characterization of the auteurs he says making great work at a pace or w intent that resists the “forward” push determined by theses services.

In other words, most of this stuff is absolute garbage, but just because Hum reminds you of a very specific era and sound doesn’t mean it’s not great art

Pruitt was my #6 - I kept coming back to it. Simple and robust material delivered by an amazing voice. Interested to see where she goes next since it’s so autobiographical.

Had Kelly Lee Owens and Microphones pretty high up as well.

Honestly could have ended at the Brody quote but I wanted to push “the Hum agenda”

Hum sounds p singular and fresh and dope in its specific sonics is the crux imo!

one of these days i will finally remember that "kelly lee owens" isn't a modern country singer, i've checked her out because of ILM before, cool stuff

Pruitt's follow-up-on-the-album work this year has been pretty solid: she dropped a personal responsibility anthem in arena rock mode called "Look the Other Way" and a solid A/B of Neil Young Covers, "Ohio/After the Gold Rush." All worth a listen.

huh katie pruitt is ok but it's not even the best country album by a woman on THIS list

An issue wrt rock might be that at this point in rock history, similar to jazz, it is difficult for new rock music to be something other than i) a m/l pastiche of the many accessible styles of rock music from the past 70 years ii) consciously avant-garde quasi-art music like Horse Lords or Oranssi Pazuzu iii) something with enough contemporary pop elements as to be heard as "pop" or "country" rather than "rock"?

xp i agree that it's not as well crafted as the brandy clark but it's equally driven; give it some time matt.

continuing the solo female artist genre roulette is an album likely to get equal TOO LOW / TOO HIGH feedback

https://i.imgur.com/wqsO6Ap.jpg
#26: Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher - 405 points - 14 votes

PHOEBE BRIDGERS - what's the deal?

https://phoebebridgers.bandcamp.com/album/punisher

“Phoebe Bridgers has created a musical monument to our dissociative age with Punisher. It’s an album about sleepless nights and sinking feelings in the pit of your stomach, wrapped in a musical package that’s both feather-light and lush enough to run your fingers through.”
https://music.avclub.com/phoebe-bridgers-is-as-anxious-as-the-rest-of-us-but-pu-1844093815

oooh "Look the Other Way" rocks

i think this is the perfect placement for this record lol

I gave Bridgers ample playing time in June, couldn't get into it, but it's my favorite thing she's done.

still totally shocked she got votesplit to death in the tracks poll

i like it so far! i just think that brandy clark record is exceptionally sharp songwriting wise, esp lyrically, "pawn shop" is like pretty much the ideal of taking cliches and taking them into something clever and new, which i guess is kinda country songwriting to me

possibly low enough

i couldn't get past the weird ass mix on punisher, seemed to be aiming for unique and ended up kinda "off" to me

Too low. This is #2, and I’ve just grown fonder of it as the months go by. Her debut was my fav album of the last decade, mind, so something to live up to, but it basically did that.

This is my #2* that is

An issue wrt rock might be that at this point in rock history, similar to jazz, it is difficult for new rock music to be something other than i) a m/l pastiche of the many accessible styles of rock music from the past 70 years ii) consciously avant-garde quasi-art music like Horse Lords or Oranssi Pazuzu iii) something with enough contemporary pop elements as to be heard as "pop" or "country" rather than "rock"?

― to party with our demons (Sund4r), Thursday, February 4, 2021 10:42 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Imho genre is a marketing category and rock is one of many pop costumes rather than the current meta-genre that encompasses all (when it tries to be that like the 1975 ppl just say it uses “contemporary pop elements” and no longer rocks)

shoutout phoebe bidges i guess

I was unsure about the production at first but don’t even remember my issues with it anymore. She tries out some stuff and that’s good.

Speaking of, an underrated album that won’t show here that Phoebe produced is Christian Lee Hutson’s

D-40, I agree! I just mean that I think this is what frustrates people who are actively looking to get into new explicitly "rock"-identified music. (In the supposed rock era, e.g. the year 1975, everything from Elton John to the Carpenters to the Eagles to Black Sabbath to Henry Cow to Pere Ubu was classified as some kind of "rock".)

hey sund4r - you like rock music? Me too! wanna go to a cool rock show? i think you like rock bands like these

http://www.rirocks.net/images/1971%2012.04%20Byrds%20-%20URI%20b.jpg

ah fuck messed it up

https://pg1.b5z.net/get/ob5z/s1000-*/zirw/1/i/u/10023017/i/ec/bmo021.JPG

Phoebe Bridgers also my #2 album. Her work, along with that of Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, is the richest indie music I've heard in years. I just keep listening and listening to this album, and finding new depths, new angles ("Moon Song" is my favorite lately). I sometimes wish she'd rhyme a little more, but I'm there more for the enunciation than the words.

i like it so far! i just think that brandy clark record is exceptionally sharp songwriting wise, esp lyrically, "pawn shop" is like pretty much the ideal of taking cliches and taking them into something clever and new, which i guess is kinda country songwriting to me

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, February 4, 2021 10:46 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is the Brandy Clark / Kasey Musgraves specialty, and I absolutely love them both, but country songwriting is fundamentally storytelling (something Clark does well on "Pawn Shop") -- Expectations is an open diary from a youthful female queer artist, stories that aren't being told by anyone else in the genre. These lyrics - told to this audience - are dramatically more exciting to me than a clever turn of phrase:

Marchin' in line in the halls of my Catholic school
Seven Hail Marys if I copped an attitude
And God was a word I had spoken but I hardly knew
Kneelin' down at the altar with no clue who I was talkin' to