Your album of 2019 (that was released before 2019)

I'd never heard Bowie's "I'm Afraid Of Americans" single until this year, bloody brilliant.

I got Blossom Dearie's "Six Classic Albums" box of her 57-61 work this year, never heard it before and just fell in love with it over the summer.

Helium's "The Dirt Of Luck" and the singles comp "More Ends With And" were also new to me this year.

My mate pointed me towards Terrible Parade in the spring, totally missed this wonderful jangly 80s band back in the day, bought their only CD comp.

Just got Jansen/Barbieri's "Other Worlds In A Small Room" as well, wonderful ambient stuff.

By some distance it's Anais Mitchell's 'Hadestown' (the original 2010 album, not this year's album based on the Broadway production). I first heard it a few months before seeing the show in NY and it would not be in my top 5 albums of the 2010s. Its scope and its inventiveness continually astound me.

Low - Double Negative
Kate Bush - The Dreaming
The Church - Heyday

in that order, I think

Richard Skelton - Landings (2009)

― pomenitul, Tuesday, 5 November 2019 15:21 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ahmad Jamal - Live at the Pershing: But Not For Me (1958)

sounds so modern in the way it breaks down into tight looping fragments and I love the drumming in particular - that deadened cavernous kick drum !

Great to see all the love for Skelbo. Back when I was alive, I wrote about it for a daft indie site (looks like shit, but might be useful for context): https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/albums/richard-skelton-landings-23827

Broadcast’s Tender Buttons has been on constant rotation for me since the prev. decade albums poll.

yeah that was a good one

Shelleyan Orphan - Helleborine
Sea Nymphs
Standish/Carlyon - Deleted Scenes

Hydroplane - S/T

Probably Electrelane No Shouts No Calls - hat tip to the lone #1 voter for it in the 2000s album poll. Some of the songs on here could be the missing link between Sonic Youth and Stereolab and Chastity Belt.

david grubbs - creep mission ... thought it were released in september (2019), but lo, it came out in 2017. it's so brief and varied (and golden) that i'll listen to it 2-3 times at any given point.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nzFNjsnbwFaaDDVXNLKhvzFwC-DSbkCG8

Jeez, I don't know. Mike Oldfield's "Incantations"? American Football's s/t? L'Orfeo? The soundtrack to Armed Police Batrider? Clifford Jordan's "Glass Bead Games"? Dogbowl's "Cyclops Nuclear Submarine Captain"? 13 Blue Magic Lane? "Like a Hurricane" by Rex Inferi?

new Arthur Russell

the Hydroplane s/t is fucking amazing

The Open Mind of John D. Loudermilk

https://i.imgur.com/6k9HS0M.jpg

"Dislocation Blues" by Chris Whitley and Jeff Lang released 2007.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0d/WhitleyLang_dislocationblues.jpg

nice JDL selection, jf !!

second Iowa Dream - Arthur Russell

steve earle - transcandental blues

https://open.spotify.com/album/15FbLxuzw8MuuIC1AOob6k?si=NvTBl3LaRpO_s-yB3mUdmw

Dogbowl's "Cyclops Nuclear Submarine Captain"

― Agnes Motörhead (rushomancy), Thursday, November 21, 2019 11:43 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Good one!

Shimmy Disc stuff in general has not been "rediscovered" yet it seems

Exile on Main St.

― jeanie bueller energy (morrisp), Tuesday, November 5, 2019 3:37 PM

Yes! I've never been super into the Stones besides like knowing the hits and all. After seeing the thread revives maybe sometime around spring this year, I went all in on the record and i just totally adore it. Topped off by it soundtracking an awesome night of drinking during summer vacation.

I've been aware of the Pop Ambient compilations for years, but I've never actually bought one until this year - I heard Leandro Fresco's "Buenos Amigos" on Sleepbot and picked up Pop Ambient 2003, and it's great. There are three killer tracks (Markus Guentner's "Express Yourself" and Klimek's "Milk and Honey") and the rest are solid. It even has a decent track by the modern-day Orb. Admittedly it's a multi-artist compilation rather than a proper album.

I find that the Pop Ambient compilations have an melancholic air. They're a throwback to the tail end of the glitch music boom of the late 1990s (the music is generally ambient-flavoured "glitch lite", e.g. "it sounds nice", and the production is a lot simpler than Autechre). The original concept is now years out of date, as if the NME had continued to release C86 updates well into the 1990s, but it persists. One day it will come to an end. There may, or may not, be a short article in The Guardian about the series, but otherwise it will vanish from the Earth without leaving a trace.

They PA albums are full of artists who released a couple of things on Kompakt in 2001-2005 and then presumably ran out of money and stopped. In 2019 there's probably masses of equally good music, but because it's not pressed onto records that are sold in shops with a marketing push I'm probably never going to hear about it. I have never met anyone in real life who knew of Arovane or Ulrich Schnauss. The irony is that music magazines are more indispensable than ever, because someone has to sift through the modern internet's detritus to find the good stuff, but music magazines are in the shitter.

Of the actual albums I bought this year the one that stands out most is Tides by Arovane (2000), mainly for nostalgia - it's derivative and frustratingly misguided but a couple of tracks stand out - and the "Subtemble / Beachfires" EP by Burial (2017), which feels like a terrific update of Orb-style ambient music, e.g. it's a bunch of samples thrown together seemingly at random but it's atmospheric and actually does sound like fires on a beach at night next to a temple.

pet shop boys - actually

Prefab Sprout - Jordan: The Comeback
one of my fave bands ~1987-1989 that i just lost track of by the time this came out and didn't listen to until a motivating Brad post earlier this year.

the Byrds - Untitled

nice JDL selection, jf !!

― budo jeru, Friday, November 22, 2019 2:12 AM

Thanks! I never really knew much about him until after he died a few years ago, and I'd started listening to a little here and there. Then I got a copy of this record for a steal and have listened to it SO MANY TIMES.

Shimmy Disc stuff in general has not been "rediscovered" yet it seems

― Evan

i ran across it looking for rock albums with clarinet on it only to find out daryl dragon was all over it?!? and this was two days after daryl dragon died, too. it was pretty spooky.

I feel silly for only having heard it for the first time this year, but Sleater-Kinney's The Hot Rock has defined the second half of this year for me. It was unbelievable to have become familiar with the band through their louder, more extravagent records, and then discover this. It was as loud and fast as their other records, but it sounded so wounded and introverted and outright sad... I can't get over how startling it is

A few stick out:

DJ Healer - Nothing 2 Loose
US Girls - In a Poem Unlimited
Sun-El Musician - Africa to the World

All three I found through the ILM Albums list too so thanks everyone! Would have made my top 10 had I heard them sooner.

Def the Bobbie Gentry jazz album that came out on her boxed set

does that have “thunder in the afternoon”? is that song available anywhere besides dodgy comps?

octobeard, have you tried Simmy’s Tugela Fairy? It’s produced by Sun-El Musician and even better than Africa to the World imo.

oor neechy and michael b's decade polls were very helpful

This is otm, between these and you, imago, getting into Scott Miller (thereby causing me to re-read his book Music: What Happened?) it really set the pace for a lot of my listening this year. If I had to narrow it down to one album, it would absolutely be Thin White Rope's Exploring the Axis. Like a goth Grateful Dead, except it actually sounds more like Talking Heads than either goth or the Dead!

https://frontierrecords-thinwhiterope.bandcamp.com/album/exploring-the-axis-2018-remastered-edition

(Close runner-up is Frozen Concentrate's A•Fro•Zen•Con•Cent•Rate, which is 100% unstreamable and which I barely could find on $l$k, though I guess the vinyl still goes for pretty cheap. It's totally glittering college pop, somewhere between Fleetwood Mac and Lizzy Mercier Descloux)

2020 time!

Introspective by an absolute mile. Why didn't you tell me, ILM. (Oh, you did?)

Special mention to Patricia Taxxon's Pix & Bit which came out late last year and which I didn't find out about until June

y no nü thred

quite a specific concept idk

Oh man I’m glad you got into Introspective... I got really into it a couple years ago... turns out PSB are better album artists than single artists!!!

I noticed your answer for last year was Actually!

oh god introspective is the fuckin best

lol i liked that you mentioned my love of Rio just now as I sort of group those two records together in my head

the fuckin widescreen 80s

Hydroplane - S/T

Oops looks like that was my answer last year. hmmm

oh wow i have a very easy and obvious answer for this year: night nurse by gregory isaacs

The song "night nurse" is fire ... guess i should listen to the whole album

the whole album is on the title track's level it's ridiculous

Real answer is probably Son House's Father of Folk Blues.

that is def the best album ever made

Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington. It was a gift from a friend a number of years ago that I never played, and forgot I owned until recently.

Evelyn "Champagne" King's Get Loose is probably the best album I heard this year.

― kitchen person, Thursday, 3 December 2020 02:24 (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This probably would have been my answer in whichever year I first heard it.

the best album i discovered this year was probably jimmy giuffre — "western suite"

i listen to it all the time now

I can't even remember how I stumbled across this Barbara & Ernie album, but I apparently listened to it so much they ended up my #1 artist in my Spotify Wrapped for 2020. It's quite nice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EApQoFzmJXw

Michael Head & The Strands - The Magical World of the Strands
Takashi Kokubo - Jamaica ～ Waves And Light And Earth
Sign Libra - Closer To The Equator

veedon fleece. i'd listened to it before but never with sustained attention

it's the best album ever made

probably danny brown's last lp.

The first album by The Left Banke, and Forever Breathes the Lonely Word by Felt.

100% Proof - The Tubby Hayes Orchestra

NRBQ at Yankee Stadium, or Pretzel Logic