We’re into the top 20 albums of 2020 (out of the nearly 80 new albums I reviewed last year). Who made the cut? Read on…
#20: Matt Karmil – STS371
This EDM record is full of throbbing bass, oil slick beats, and ambient / psychedelic synths. It works its way under your skin and moves your bones.
#19: Ultraflex – Visions of Ultraflex
Cover that looks like a 1980s New Age CD? Check. Synthwave keyboards that could fit right into a sci-fi film? Check. Sexy Replicant vocals? Check. Visions of Ultraflexmanages to be both a neat synthwave album and one of the best make-out records of 2020 at the same time.
#18: Oh Sees – Metamorphosed
This album is “only” five tracks in length, and the first three are under two minutes each. The other two, however, make up for the rest of the album’s time length of over forty minutes. It’s a mix of punk rockers and prog-psych-krautrock jams that shows how deftly Oh Sees can move back and forth between styles.
#17: HolyWave – Interloper
Holy Wave came back with a fine addition to their catalogue. Interloperblends psychedelia with some shoegaze and surf elements and is full of songs about not fitting in or being comfortable anywhere. That alone could sum up 2020.
#16: Oh Sees – Live at Big Sur
Yes, two Oh Sees albums in this list. Live at Big Surwas their second live-streamed show of 2020. They played at the Henry Miller Library and dove deep into their back catalogue to play stuff they hadn’t played live in years. The encore was a barrage of covers, many of them Black Flag tunes.
We’re over halfway through the list! Come back tomorrow for more!
We’re already at my top 10 singles of 2020. Time’s already flying by!
#10: Liam Kazar – “Shoes Too Tight”
This came out of nowhere and turned out to be one of the catchiest, sharpest singles I heard all year. Mr. Kazar can’t come out with a full-length album soon enough for my liking. This song shows a level of playful artistry sorely lacking in a lot of music right now.
#9: Matt Karmil – “210”
This house track drops like an empty Red Bull can onto a dance floor full of sweaty, sexy people. I’m not sure I can sum it up better than that.
#8: Protomartyr – “Processed By the Boys”
This track from Ultimate Success Today is a great example of what Protomartyr do so well – blending mysterious lyrics and vocals with rock chops that border on psychedelia.
#7: Heartless Bastards – “Revolution”
This surprise single came out of Erika Wennerstrom being frustrated with damn well everything in 2020. She summed up how we all felt and gave us a rallying cry for 2021.
#6: Teenager – “Good Time”
Listening to this is some of the best music fun I had all year. It was stuck in my head for days after first hearing it. It’s a song about how love is fleeting to a sweet groove that is nothing short of smile-inducing.
Only five left to go! Who makes it to the top? Come back tomorrow to learn!
Yes, the beginning of the year means the avalanche of “Best of…” lists from me. This year’s will include singles, albums, and albums of the last five years. Unfortunately, the only concert I got to this year was seeing BODEGA and The Wants in Chicago. It was a good gig, so at least the one show I attended was a blast (even though I might’ve caught a mild strain of COVID-19 there).
Let’s get on with the singles, shall we?
#15: October and the Eyes – “All My Love”
Good heavens, what a sexy track. This cut from October and the Eyes‘ excellent debut album, Dogs and Gods, instantly brought to mind Dum Dum Girls, Bauhaus, and Siouxsie and the Banshees – but somehow with more sweaty lovemaking.
#14: Khruangbin – “Time (You and I)”
This track off Mordechai is so funky you can hardly believe it. Listening to this while walking will instantly put a strut into your step.
#13: The Chats– “Pub Feed”
Coming from High Risk Behaviour, his is one of the most fun punk tracks I’ve heard all year. It’s brash, brazen, and a salute to eating and boozing in pubs. What’s not to like?
#12: Kelly Lee Owens – “Night”
This is one of two Kelly Lee Owens’ songs from Inner Song that made my top 15 singles of 2020. This one, like pretty much anything else she puts out there, almost makes me want to throw my digital turntables in the trash because, good grief, why should I even bother?
#11: Too Free – “No Fun”
This Washington D.C. band came out of nowhere for me and, like Ms. Owens, dropped two of my top 15 tracks of 2020. This one, despite its title, is a lot of fun.
Who makes the top 10? Come back tomorrow to find out.
Why thirty-five albums in this list? I reviewed almost eighty albums released last year (and many others released at least a year ago). I always recap the top half of the list, so thirty-five was about right. Everyone agrees that 2020 was a crappy year, but we had a lot of good music. A lot of bands and artists had nothing else to do but create amazing music to keep them and us sane.
#35: Rituals of Mine – Hype Nostalgia
This is a sharp album about being an outsider, love and lust, and knowing when to draw a line in the sand. It mixes electronica and synthwave well and constantly intrigues you.
#34: Sofia Kourtesis – Sarita Colonia
This EP is one of the best electro / dance records I heard all year. It wasn’t on my radar until I stumbled onto it via Bandcamp. It was a breath of fresh air as lovely as it sky on its cover this year.
#33: Melkbelly – PITH
These Chicago punks / post-punks / rockers / do they really need a label? came out swinging with their new album. It’s one of those records that make you think, “Damn, they’re not screwing around.”
#32: Oh Sees – Protean Threat
Am I the only one who thinks that if you cut up the album cover for Protean Threat into four squares and rearranged them in the right pattern that it would reveal a secret image? The album is one of many releases from Oh Sees / Osees this year, who might’ve been the most prolific band of 2020. It’s a wild, fun time, of course, full of blazing rockers and krautrock jams.
#31: New Bomb Turks – Nightmare Scenario (Diamond Edition)
This is easily my favorite re-release of the year. Ohio punk legends New Bomb Turks released a raw version of their classic mid-1990s album Nightmare Scenario for the album’s twenty-fifth anniversary. It shreds and was a much needed adrenaline boost in a year when we didn’t have much to be excited about in terms of entertainment and did have a lot of anger to expel.
Who cracks the top 30? Come back tomorrow to find out!
Following the release of their album ‘The Passion Of…‘ earlier this year, New Orleans-based punk band Special Interest have announced a new 12″ release ‘Street Pulse Beat‘, which features remixes from Boy Harsher, Ruth Mascelli and DJ Haram. The record is set for release on Jan 8th via Nude Club Records and is available for pre-order and today the “Street Pulse Beat (Boy Harsher Remix)” is streaming online.
As well as the ‘Street Pulse Beat’ Maxi 12″, Special Interest will also digitally release ‘The Passion Of: Remixed‘ on Jan 8th, which is made up of 11 tracks, including the remixes on the 12″ & various other reworks by artists such as Hide & w00dy. People who purchase the Maxi 12” on Bandcamp, will receive a free download of ‘The Passion Of Remixed’ too.
All proceeds will go to House of Tulip (https://houseoftulip.org), which was co-founded and is currently co-led by 2 Black transgender women. House of Tulip provides trans and gender-nonconforming communities in New Orleans, Louisiana with economic stability and safety through zero barrier permanent housing and pathways to education, healthcare, employment, and homeownership.
“This remix of ‘Street Pulse Beat’ came from the depths of springtime lockdown. In a bleak and uncertain world, Special Interest was keeping our creative spirit alive. This remix was made entirely with the OB-6, SH-101, and the JV-1080. Trading in distorted guitars for plucky bent synths, Boy Harsher’s remix offers their signature melancholy sound. Ali Logout’ confidently controls the energy, reminding us that synthwave can still have a backbone and can hang with the punks.” – Boy Harsher
Adding to this, Special Interest vocalist Alli Logout said the track is “A ballad for lovers delusions of grandeur in the depth of the terror that is codependency.”
Miss Grit, moniker of Korean-American musician Margaret Sohn, announces her Impostor EP, out February 5th, and presents its lead single “Dark Side Of The Party.” Sohn makes relatable songs that masterfully dissect the feeling of self-doubt. Her songs can drastically shift from delicate to explosive as they show her technical prowess as a guitarist and melodist, and her evocative lyricism. On the heels of her Talk Talk EP, a “truly awe-inspiring first work” (NME), Impostor is a six song collection that’s more cathartic, resolute, and fully documents the array of talents she brings as a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and producer.
Throughout Impostor, Sohn explores the titular “impostor syndrome” that so often characterizes the insecurities of the early 20s. The songs address her life-long navigation through the racial impostor syndrome she experienced as a half-Korean girl “trying to fit into the white space” of the Michigan suburbs where she grew up. Not even a move to New York City, where she studied music technology at NYU and began to dream of creating effects pedals for a living, could ease her internal conflict. Part of that uneasiness for Sohn was her initial success with Talk Talk and the feeling “she was someone who was impersonating a musician.” Her solution was producing the EP by herself at Brooklyn’s Virtue and Vice Studios so that she had complete creative control.
Throughout Impostor, the sound moves from dirty and aggressive to hypnotic and ethereal. The inventive “Dark Side Of The Party” boasts fuzzed-out riffs and synth theatrics, and is an anthem for feeling out of place at a party full of surface-level conversations and ulterior motives. She sings, “I can’t tell hearts apart from spare parts/I try, I try, I try/Why can’t I?” “I’ve gone my whole life feeling really uncomfortable defining myself,” Sohn says. “I realized that a lot of the time, I’m more comfortable with other people defining me and making up their mind about who I’m supposed to be.” Writing this EP helped her understand that futile pattern. Miss Grit is a project that allows Sohn to break through self-bias, creating a version of herself that doesn’t need to be limited. Expressing herself through her powerful, confident music while still being vulnerable about her insecurities is a dynamic that characterizes her work, with all of its pushes and pulls of emotion. Ultimately, Sohn says, the Impostor EP is about feeling self-doubt, working through it with music, and letting it all subside. Listen to “Dark Side Of The Party”
Tokyo-based musician Nana Yamato announces her debut album, Before Sunrise, out February 5th on Dull Tools, and presents the lead single/video “If.” By day, Yamato is an ordinary girl who marches anonymously between her flat, her school and her job. But by night, she becomes something else — a young artist and record collector whose urge for connection and expression has created one of the best underground pop records to come out of Japan, and elsewhere for that matter. Her calling was found when one day she entered Big Love Records in Harajuku, Tokyo to buy an Iceage album. She then began going there everyday after school, where her studies shifted to the week’s latest indie rock releases. “Everything in my life started there.”
Yamato’s brilliance lies in a profound imagination that confronts the isolation and claustrophobia of Tokyo life, without losing grasp of the whimsy and romance of girlhood. It’s hard to ignore the romance the artist has with the streets that she walks; Japanese and English vocals sing about the lights and sounds of the city, as if there’s no place else she could exist. Each song on Before Sunrise is a secret hidden in the late-night glow of a young girl’s bedroom, created in the precious witching hours of the teenage heart, before dawn returns with the tedious demands of adulthood. Dreams, and the language of living inside one’s imagination, are the prevailing theme of Before Sunrise. Yamato describes her style as “critical fantasy,” a fitting label for a sound that exists as much in a carefree daydream as they do in a crowded subway.
Throughout lead single “If,” a collage of drum machine, grungy guitar and synth are the terrain over which Nana’s voice floats. Singing in Japanese and English, her words are delivered with a cool confidence, as if fearlessly navigating a bizarre dreamscape. On “If,” Nana Yamato defines a new idiom of city music. Much in the way trip-hop articulated the nightlife of Bristol and London, she scores the soundtrack of an imaginative introvert wandering a crowded metropolis, hiding in plain sight in the hazy glow of neon. For the video, Yamato studied patterns of various animals and traced them frame by frame, making nearly 200 drawings. “The video is set up with me as an up-and-coming cartoonist who’s on deadline,” Nana explains. “She falls asleep while thinking about the comic. In her dreams, she meets the characters she created. She gets lost in her own imaginary world. My work is realistic fantasy, or critical fantasy. It’s not about fantasizing to escape reality, but about fighting reality by fantasizing.”
Nana’s debut LP, much like her previous 7” records released under the ANNA moniker, is a strictly DIY affair. Yamato sings and plays guitar, creates beats and MIDI melodies, in addition to creating the drawings and design of the LP itself. Produced by P.E.’sJonathan Schenke, who has worked with Parquet Courts, Liars, and Surfbort, among others, Before Sunrise marks the arrival of an artist who has found her voice. She is not just the pupil of the new arrivals bin, but of a life spent as a defiant dreamer, in the secret world that begins after childhood and before sunrise. Watch Nana Yamato’s Video for “If”
Before Sunrise Tracklist 1.Do You Wanna 2. If 3. Burning Desire 4. Gaito 5. Dreamwanderer 6. Fantasy 7. Polka Dot Bells 8. Before Sunrise 9. Voyage et Merci 10. Under The Cherry Moon 11. Morning Street 12. The Day Song
Keep your mind open.
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Tell Me Your Mind and I’ll Tell You Mineis an EP by King Hannah that I wasn’t sure about at first. It didn’t immediately grab me, but I could feel something there I couldn’t quite describe. Was it a batch of dream pop hooks? Vocal craft from a synthwave torch singer lounge? I’m still not sure after listening to the EP multiple times, but I’m sure that it gets into your body and settles there like a warm cat on your chest that now and then likes to nibble on your fingers.
The EP opens with the lush, somewhat dark “And Then Out of Nowhere, It Rained.” Hannah Merrick‘s voice is like a ghost drifting toward you across an English moor and the synths and acoustic guitar riffs are like a fog that’s gone just as you notice it, blending into “Meal Deal” – which has a bit of an Americana / western sound to it with its mix of steel guitar and electro-drone.
I don’t know who “Bill Tench” is, but Merrick says, “I think you’re cooler than most,” at the beginning of the track, so he must be at least an interesting fellow. The song has a great bass groove and shoegaze guitars throughout it. “I need you so bad,” Merrick sings on “Crème Brûlée” – a haunting, sexy track in which she also admits, “I think I like you too much.” David Lynch could drop this into the soundtrack of his next film and no one would bat an eye.
“The Sea Has Stretch Marks” is easily one of the most intriguing titles I’ve heard all year, and the song rolls along like slow waves on a pebble stone beach. The album ends with “Reprise (Moving Day).” It’s an intriguing track full of shoegaze bliss, heavy bass, strange samples about (I think) Greek gods, and stuff you’d hear strolling the streets of San Futuro, California before it metamorphoses into quiet dream pop.
King Hannah tells us their mind throughout this EP, but we’re left wondering many things. It provides more questions than answers, which makes us eager to hear more from them – as any good EP should.
Brijean – the Oakland-based duo of Brijean Murphy and Doug Stuart – announces their new album, Feelings, out February 26th on Ghostly International, and shares the lead single/video, “Day Dreaming.” The forthcoming album and lead track draw on Murphy’s experience growing up in a family immersed in jazz, Latin, and soul music, and arrive after working extensively within Oakland’s diverse music scene and as one of indie’s most in-demand percussionists (Poolside, Toro Y Moi, U.S. Girls). In 2018, she began recording songs with multi-instrumentalist and producer Doug Stuart, who shares a background in jazz and pop in bands such as Dougie Stu, Bells Atlas, Meernaa, and Luke Temple.
Album opener “Day Dreaming” is a dynamic celebration of newness: the excitement in finding deeper understandings of yourself as you get to know someone, something, or somewhere new. The track is guided by a lush mix of charismatic keyboard chords, grooving bass lines, and radiant conga-driven rhythms. Produced by Stuart with vocals and percussion by Murphy, the track also includes Chaz Bear who engineered and played keyboard. The accompanying video was shot on an iPhone in Los Angeles by Murphy and Stuart and then transformed by flatspot ___• into an immersive and psychedelic world.
Brijean states, “We had been wanting to work with flatspot ___• for a long time – both circling around each other at shows, collectives, and studios for years and finally got to collaborate on this project. His work with Smart Bomb has been a visual anchor and inspiration for Oakland creatives.”
flatspot ___• adds, “I try to leave space in the editing process for the unexpected. It is essential for me, when using analog gear and video feedback, to allow the eccentricities of the electronics to bring out new character. I send the footage through the wires and circuits and experiment with different settings until the desired outcome reveals itself. What is revealed to me by the old gear is just as important, if not more than any plan I may have made.”
Following the duo’s first sessions, which resulted in the mini-album Walkie Talkie(released in 2019 on Native Cat Recordings), Brijean continued collaborating in Oakland, inviting friends Chaz Bear, Tony Peppers, and Hamir Atwal, who all would end up contributing to the album. “We improvised on different feels for hours,” says Murphy. “Nothing quite developed at first but we had seeds. We re-opened the sessions a couple months later, after returning from tours, and spent a month developing the songs in a little 400 square foot cottage.”
The leap from 2019’s Walkie Talkie to Feelings is marked by a notable expanse in range and energy. Brijean’s signature sound — a golden-hued dream pop tropicalia of dazzling beats and honeyed vocals — elevates with the addition of live drummers, strings, and synths. The album also finds Murphy fully trusting in her strengths, not just as a percussionist, but as a songwriter and collaborator. “Valuing myself as elemental instead of an ‘aux’ percussionist, and the undoubted support and talents of Doug, encouraged me to both make this project and collaborate with many different people.”
Brijean wants you to move, physically, mentally, dimensionally; this is dance music for the mind, body, and soul. With Feelings, they’ve manifested a gentle collective space for respite, for self-reflection, for self-care, for uninhibited imagination and new possibilities. The album cultivates a specific vibe, a softness Murphy has come to call “romancing the psyche.” In nebulous and verdant worlds of hazy melodies, feathery hooks, and percussive details, Feelings simply want us to feel alive. The songs radiate in wonderful abandon and with a sense of devotion to the self.
Com Truise‘s 2016 EP Silicon Tarepacks more synthwave goodness into its five tracks than most full-length synthwave albums from other artists.
“Sunspot” starts with a horror movie synth-stab and then the wicked beat drops in and you’re strolling down the16-bit video game road much like the person depicted on the EP’s cover. “Forgive,” with its snappy beats, dance floor synths, and fuzzed bass, is Harold Faltermeyer‘s “Axel F” if “Axel F” was a champion kickboxer / ninja / international spy instead of a street-smart Detroit cop transplanted to Beverly Hills.
“Diffraction” bounces and blips and bumps like something in a futuristic disco. It’s a delight. Truise layers beats upon beats and also knows when to pull out some of those layers at the right times to keep your mind and hips moving without getting overloaded. The title track is music to bump from your Blade Runner Spinner as it cruises down a Chinatown street or over high-rise buildings full of people who might be more human than human. “du Zirconia” closes the album with electronic chops that could double as video game rifle fire sounds, synths that chirp like robotic birds, and bass that softly hums like a well-tuned speeder bike engine.
Silicon Tare is one of those EP’s that is over far too soon. You will want this to be a full album, even a double album, but Com Truise has plenty of material out there from before and after this (including a new record, In Decay, Too, coming out in December). Don’t hesitate to check out his catalogue.
