New website, time to reiterate my years-old disclaimers!
Disclaimer the First: I am stupid at music!
This is the only disclaimer, thank you.
I just want to make clear, as always, that I really don’t have any technical understanding of music whatsoever, and I’m not that well-listened. Your proper music critic listened to hundreds of albums last year and can subdivide them by genres I’ve never even heard of; I don’t even remember how to read music anymore. This remains a top ten because I don’t listen to enough to have anything bigger. In any given year, I only give a handful of albums a full listen, and I sort of peruse others until I have a sense of whether they’re for me. I can’t give you a thorough dissection. I just like things, and I like to write about things that I like! Maybe you, if you are as stupid as me, will like them too!
Anyway, from my limited perspective, 2021 struck me as kind of a slow year for music. There are years when it feels like new stuff just gets dumped on me, and then there are years where I have to go looking for something new to listen to. 2021 was one of the latter, usually. It was a bit of a disappointing year, too — a handful of artists I usually enjoy, or who I thought had promise, released new albums that just didn’t do much for me. Modest Mouse, Lorde…does anyone even know there was a new Sleater-Kinney last year?
But some other old favorites delivered in a big way, and I made a couple of fun new discoveries, the way I often do when the mainstays are letting me down. I can’t say it was all bad. A lot of the albums here are going to stay in my rotation for a long time, maybe forever. 2021: Short on really good stuff, but enough great stuff to keep the balance.
10. Squid — Bright Green Field:
This is almost a placeholder decision. I discovered these guys late in the game. I’m still exploring Bright Green Field, and…god, I don’t know how I feel about a lot of this. I don’t have much of a framework for something this out there. But it certainly grabbed my attention, and even if I don’t completely understand it yet, I haven’t gotten bored trying, which usually signifies a future all-time favorite. I love that jazz right now is a marriage of the old-school, highly technical music nerd stuff to dudes with cartoon character voices yelling about complete nonsense. Ollie Judge makes this band for me. I need him to do the full Isaac Brock, just get more and more manic and out of control with each album (just without the part where Brock eventually just…stopped doing that). I think Bright Green Field is more of an album listen than an individual song listen — you sort of need the full context to get the Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts-esque cheerful dystopia vibe I think (?) Squid is going for. At the end of the day, what I’m out for is something different, and Squid…well, enough said. This is the sort of album that either heralds the arrival of a titan, or a quick burnout, nothing in between. Either way, it’s a gift.
9. Psychedelic Porn Crumpets — SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound:
I think I may have exhausted the full scope of everything I could ever say about…sigh…the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets back when I tackled…sigh…And Now for the Whatchamacallit. I think I would call…sigh…SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound a lateral move, neither better or worse than its predecessor and not much of an evolution for the band, which makes it even more difficult to have thoughts about it. The gist of it is that the Crumpets hit that sweet spot of unique and accessible that’s where a lot of the music I love most lives. For that reason, more of the same is good enough for me right now. That said, I’m anxious because this very much feels like a band that can’t sustain the same old thing for another album. Good stuff, highly enjoyable, hope it isn’t the last time I’m able to care about these guys.
8. Courtney Barnett — Things Take Time, Take Time:
I’m enjoying the mellowing-out of Courtney Barnett more than most people, I think. I’m with you, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit is her best work by a wide margin, I miss it, I hope she finds her way back to that zone eventually. But she’s still a solid songwriter, and she has an “artist for her times” quality that I find underrated — that dull bittersweetness, that millennial malaise, deadpan voice snarking over observations of a collapsing world, not quite masking the genuine fear beneath it. I’m not sure I have the patience for another round of this, but then again, I was worried Things Take Time, Take Time wasn’t going to work for me either. Barnett has my ear. I miss the rock n’ roll, but I can content myself with this.
7. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis — CARNAGE:
Nick Cave does not strike me as the sort of artist who ought to be prolific — he has the energy of a guy who disappears into his attic and reemerges every decade with some painstakingly crafted, gut-wrenching masterpiece — but I’m grateful he is, and somehow he still manages to deliver on the “painstakingly crafted, gut-wrenching masterpiece” part of the equation. It’s nice to see him scale back a little in the wake of Ghosteen, make something a little more digestible, if not much less grim. I know very little about Warren Ellis, and I’m not sure what his contribution was here — there’s nothing that distinguishes CARNAGE from anything else Cave has done with the Bad Seeds of late. But that doesn’t make this any less an unsurprisingly strong outing from a pair of artists who are not often off their game.
6. Iceage — Seek Shelter:
I’m new to these guys! I was not aware they existed prior to this year. My shallow perusal of the rest of their discography was enough to confirm that Seek Shelter is indeed a major sound shift for what used to be a particularly dark, aggressive punk band. But it seems to me like their fans are mostly on board with it, which more than anything is a sign of a stellar album. What they’ve found here at the very least equals their previous work; personally, I think it’s even better, and that’s despite my uncharacteristic soft spot for obnoxious punk. I think the core of what they’ve always been remains intact here, which probably eased the transition; they’ve just transferred it into the trappings of emotive DIY alt rock. Like all the best punk frontmen, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt is not what you would call a good singer, but he’s one of the select few able to turn that weakness into strength. It’s vulnerable rather than grating. And the songs themselves are really strong; Seek Shelter contains a sizable chunk of my favorites last year. There’s album of the year material here; a couple of tracks tending mediocre are all that kept it from the top half of this list.
5. St. Vincent — Daddy’s Home:
I have a weird relationship with this one. I love it, but I don’t; it’s great, but it’s flawed; I could listen to the album all day, but I can’t say the same for most of the songs individually. And you know what? I think that works for it, in a weird way. Given the overall theme of the album, it makes an odd sort of sense for the whole thing to feel like it’s at war with itself. Sometimes raw, sometimes traditional, sometimes overproduced, sometimes bubbly, Daddy’s Home has its fingers in a lot of pots but they all have something good in them. Or at least something interesting. It pales in comparison to St. Vincent’s last two albums, one of which I awarded AOTY status, but most things do.
4. Arlo Parks — Collapsed in Sunbeams:
Arlo Parks is easily the most promising newcomer of 2021. She still needs fine-tuning on a few fronts, but she’s naturally gifted in a way that makes me think she might be a big deal in the making. I’m not surprised to find her working her way into Phoebe Bridgers’ circles. They might be in different genres — Bridgers more a singer-songwriter, Parks more R&B — but their energy is very similar. They’re both strong lyricists with distinctive voices, bittersweet outlooks, and effortless songwriting ability. Catchy, moving, memorable. Collapsed in Sunbeams is very, very good. Parks’ next might be an all-timer.
3. Japanese Breakfast — Jubilee:
I’ve been aware of Japanese Breakfast for a couple years, but 2021 was when I started getting into them. Jubilee precipitated a deep dive into the rest of their discography because it’s one of those insta-great albums that makes you wonder why it took you so long to check it out. I’m a sucker for the alt-pop scene in general, but really, with Jubilee, it’s the simple things: it took me maybe two or three listens for every chorus to lodge itself in my brain and write itself in my heart. It’s music that becomes part of you. The first time you listen to it, you’re humming along by the end even though you don’t completely know the tune yet.
2. IDLES — CRAWLER:
If, on November 12, you heard a sigh of relief loud enough to crack the earth, that was me listening to CRAWLER for the first time. I sort of got Star Wars prequel’d into loving Ultra Mono the first couple of listens — “Is this…not working for me? No, no, that can’t be, it’s IDLES. I just don’t get it yet. Listen to, you know…that thing. I think I like that. Yeah, I like that. I definitely do.” And it took a while for the fact that it is mostly not good to catch up to me. I was sort of primed for disappointment — I thought then, and still think now, that basically all the singles are awesome, and the album has some of the band’s best production to date. But yeah. There are a lot of duds on there. And worse, they’re duds that suggest a band running out of ideas, going through the motions. So it is to my great relief, many months later, that CRAWLER is pretty friggin’ great and I only get more convinced of the fact with each listen. IDLES was in need of evolution, and that’s exactly what they did on CRAWLER. They’ve always denied being a punk band, and CRAWLER’s the first time that hasn’t felt like BS. There’s more variety than usual. You get your bluntly political headbangers, of course, but there’s a lot of atmosphere, a lot of experimentation, a lot of new elements thrown into the mix. It’s the best Joe Talbot has ever been as a vocalist, not that the bar is super high. But more importantly, where Ultra Mono fell back on a lot of generic platitudes — without the tongue-in-cheek, all-loving cheese of Joy As an Act of Resistance — CRAWLER makes it personal. It phrases things uniquely. It feels like someone’s actual perspective rather than a recitation of a party platform. It’s a grimmer, more sincere album than I’m accustomed to from these guys, and I won’t lie — I miss the oafish positivity of their previous work. But this is a very well-rounded, mature album. It swiftly restored my hope that IDLES may yet have a long and fruitful future ahead of them.
- Little Simz — Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
It’s not clear to me, given my lack of interaction with the finer points of music criticism, but it seems from the outside looking in as though Sometimes I Might Be Introvert has achieved Parasite levels of Consensus Best Thing of the Year. If that is indeed true, far be it from me to disagree. I’m glad I managed to get on the Little Simz train just before she solidified herself as a master in the making, so now I can share in the collective cred of having liked her before she was cool. Though if it’s all right with you, I’m planning to keep liking her after. For the life of me, I do not understand how this is not a person with multiple Top Ten hits. Between this and GREY Area, I’m not even sure I have a use for non-Little Simz rap albums in my life anymore. It seems like every rapper eventually has to prove him- or herself on a gargantuan feature film-length album that doubles as a thesis statement of his or her entire life, and Little Simz’ attempt dunked so hard the backboard shattered. I don’t know whether she’s the best rapper working — there are a lot of people in contention for that. But if she keeps this up — if she keeps even fifty percent of this up — that title’s in the bag before 2030 comes around. In the six years I’ve been doing this, I don’t think I’ve ever had an easier time naming a number one.
Matthew Triponey 