Fall’s Album of the Year Contenders
ISSUE #255
It’s tailgating season, which means it’s fall album season, which means it’s time to start encouraging people at the game to listen to Mitski. This year’s album autumn has some exciting heavy hitters on deck, from Sufjan’s upcoming return to form to Marnie Stern’s first album in ten long years. Already we’re dancing in the fallout from Olivia Rodrigo’s juggernaut GUTS, and coming soon are what promise to be great releases from Slow Pulp, Armand Hammer, Lilts, Sampha, and L’Rain. And if you have four hours to kill under the falling leaves, don’t miss DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s Destiny.
Check out these cuts from the fall’s most promising and place your bets on who crawls out of the rubble with the pennant.
MJ Lenderman is one of the greatest guitarists. A supreme pleasure I get out of listening to his latest album is the sick guitar. He makes it talk, baby! I hear Dinosaur Jr. and Zappa’s best; I hear chapters in a book that switches narrators.
The opener to Mitski's latest album, “Bug Like an Angel,” starts as many songs do: with a single strum of an acoustic guitar. It’s not long before her voice becomes a choir, and the effect is that of intoxication, a blossom in the bloodstream, sinking at first and floating toward the end. Iggy Pop has described her as “probably the most advanced American songwriter that I know.”
I may have mentioned last week that 1984 did not turn out to be Orwell’s dystopia—but there was one consequential act of censorship that occurred. It was no panopticon, no ever-present Big Brother, no. Instead, it took the form of a tiny sticker—one that read “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics,” and has adorned nearly every heavy metal, punk, and hip hop album since the mid-1980s.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.
Yet these are often sophisticated and complex compositions. They’re designed at first provide stimulating play, but there’s artistic meat there nonetheless. It’s a hyper mix of classical, breakcore, bubblegum pop, and progressive rock.
When I started gathering my research for this Annivyrsary back in January, one thing became clear—1974 was not a good year for music. This was very much a puberty period, an awkward personality vacuum that comes between shedding the old and fully realizing the new. This was to be my Waterloo.
“Yup! Like it or not, Creed is back on top of the chart.” This is the caption that greeted me when I opened this month’s issue of my new favorite publication, The Cabbagetown Neighbor.
It’s hot out there folks, so you know what that means—fight fire with fire, crank up the heat, love your blisters till they callous. Just grab onto whatever you can.
Technically, halfway through the year is next Monday, July 1st. This is a leap year, after all. They’re the only years where there’s an even split in days; the only times the divide falls at midnight, not noon.
There are now roving bands of sonic scavengers in the fractured data gutters of the post–Web 2.0 internet, musicians often known by little more than alt-code symbols (♡u∫agi幻覚∀∁ⓛᙌ✬) or keyboard vomit (Sophiaaaahjkl;8901). These boundary pushers are chopping and screwing so hard it sounds like a chainsaw, their samples reduced to little more by the end than glitter and stardust.
I’ve been watching through the films of Danny Boyle. Some examples: Trainspotting, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire. From early on, Boyle was rightfully recognized for his edgy and sophisticated musical taste—the Trainspotting soundtrack alone, from Iggy’s “Lust for Life” through Underworld’s “Born Slippy (Nuxx)”, helped define the tastes of a whole generation.
Trance is one of the cheesiest genres in the world, which makes it one of the very best. Contrary to the name, it is not conventionally relaxing, though I find strange comfort when awash in it. It usually starts with a kick drum, then a tide of synthesizers, then arpeggios that dart and echo like a bee trapped in a concert hall.
My little brother died just after midnight on January 20, 2023. We buried a handful of his ashes in the Smoky Mountains on his 28th birthday that May. I know we weren’t supposed to. What choice did we have? It was one of his wishes; I’d fulfill them all if I could.
Feeling stressed? Overwhelmed? Press play and step into my garden. Breathe deep and put your hands in the dirt. These songs will hydrate you, warm you up, root you into place.
Irv Teibel, who released the influential Environments records over ten years from 1969–79, was a pioneer in putting field recordings (i.e., nature sounds) into the hands of stressed-out college students and, eventually, anyone who needed to drown out all the noise. Turns out that was a lot of people.