To further showcase just how much I’ve been slacking on this blog, this record was sent to me at the same time as Jet Black’s wonderful L’Ere du Vide, which I got before Christmas.
Admittedly, it was a little hard for me to give this record the time it deserves, buried as it was under a deluge of Christmas records that I was spending more time with. But as I’ve listened to this bit of rambunctious alt-rock, I’ve fallen in love with it.
As broad as I like to think my musical tastes are, there are times that I might actually be pretty predictable.
Take for example my love of dark, guitar heavy, shoegaze inspired indie rock. So infamous am I for my love of this aesthetic that around Christmas, a friend messaged me this album on Spotify saying I would probably like it.
Later that same day, another friend sent me a vinyl copy as a present.
They were both very correct.
Post rock is typically a patient genre. Bands build elaborate landscapes of cinematic splendor and emotional catharsis that evoke the heights and depths of the human experience. But this usually takes a while: it’s not unusual for a post rock tune to sail right past the seven-minute mark—or even the ten minute mark.
But on -aire, The End of the Ocean achieves the same evocative heights without wasting any time.
One of the most interesting things about post rock is that as clear as the conventions of the genre are, it’s a rare thing for a band to put out a record that hits all the right notes without seeming derivative.
But on their debut full-length, Texas natives Driving Slow Motion offer up a brand of heavy post rock that feels fresh without adding too much to the tried-and-true post rock formula.
After five albums, Scottish dream pop darlings Cocteau Twins found something they never expected their blissful, ambiguous, ethereal pop songs to deliver…
Commercial success.
The mid 2000s saw no shortage of bands offering an electrifying mixture dance punk and post punk (see also: The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, etc).
However, few groups managed to do so with the sheer excitement and urgency as Bloc Party did on their 2005 debut.
After falling in love with Purple a few years ago and Gold & Grey more recently, I’ve decided that it’s high time I dig deeper into Baroness’ celebrated back catalog.
And with just a precursory listen to their first three records, they’ve established themselves as a band that can do no wrong. This is clearly displayed on their debut full-length, Red Album, a nonstop, heavy metal tour-de-force.
After the heavy melodicism of 2015’s Purple, falling in love with Gold & Grey was a pretty easy task.
But where Purple was a relatively brief affair, this record stretches out, making itself comfortable in its sonic space with a gravity that is solemn without being inaccessible.
The 2010s were an odd decade. We endured the end of the world several separate occasions, between various crackpot pastors and the long-speculated Mayan Calendar. We lost a number of legendary performers, including many of the best to ever live (Prince, Bowie, Lemmy, etc). We watched terrorism and fascism rise as the lines between truth and opinion blurred and vanished. Memes rose and fell like empires.
And in the midst of it, an onslaught of incredible music was released. Personally, my record collection grew from under a hundred to over a thousand. My tastes shifted drastically and corrected course throughout the course of the decade.
Reducing those ten years to fifty records feels like a fool’s errand, but here I am.
As we sit on the cusp of a new year—and a new decade—it’s become customary to look back and quantify all of the music produced into a neat little list of what’s noteworthy.
While these lists are always bound to vary from person to person and between publications, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so much variation as in 2019. This year was an undeniable banner year for music, with excellent release after excellent release piling up relentlessly without ceasing. If you slipped behind, there was no hope of catching up.
As I look back on the year, I keep being surprised by all the stuff I missed—either ubiquitous barn burners like Lizzo or Lana Del Ray’s NFR or artists I love like Solange and Deerhunter. Even among releases I loved and purchased, quantifying all of it into a top ten list proved a much more difficult task than most years.
And so, as much as I stand by this list, I’m fully aware how flawed a ranked top whatever format is for describing just how magnanimous this year’s musical output was.