Soundcheck’s Albums Of The Year

The coffee pot is full and the headphones are on. What a year in music.

The past few days I’ve been listening to a playlist called “To Get To”, trying to catch up on things. So let’s begin there – with what I left out, always the hard part of year end lists.

So Many Great Albums

I haven’t given Julien Baker’s Turn Out The Lights the time it deserves, and I know it. I really love what I’ve heard. Ditto, the new Bjork, which is almost too magical to sit through at once. The playlist includes the new Waxahatchee, The National, and Father John Misty. Great releases all, but due to time constraints none that I’ve really worn out.

Which makes me wonder – is wearing an album out what qualifies for Album Of The Year? That’s how I’ve done it this year, given how much I’ve seemingly needed these albums for one reason or another.

Damn.

By this metric, my Hands Down Album of The Year is Damn. by Kendrick Lamar. No release in a long time has got me through so many hurdles, or amplified the good times. It’s also an incredible achievement – an album that crosses all boundaries, and probably deserves a category unto itself.

Damn. probably wouldn’t exist without the advent of indie rock. It’s a fitting choice for a station like ours, given the tentacles of it. And Damn. is so many things; conflicted, bipolar, hyped, and seemingly everyone’s album of the year. It also became a ready-made workout playlist, and there were certainly many treadmills in my 2017. Thank you, K Lamar, for helping me sweat those out.

Process

Then, there’s diesel engine that got me through 2017, and that is Sampha’s Process. It’s a stunning debut. It also has one of the most poignant songs I heard all year, about a piano and a son’s relationship with his mother. Sampha, an English newcomer who can name-check Kayne, Drake, and Solange, is so much more to me than a beats-driven lyricist. He story-tells like great English songwriters. A friend said he makes him think of an urban Nick Drake; he certainly wears his heart on his sleeve and perhaps that’s not too far off.

A Deeper Understanding

In the category of Music To Keep You Going, The War On Drugs always keep me pressing on, and what a highlight to see them cover Tom Petty in their Ogden Theatre show in October. Adam Granduciel remains one of the more interesting and unexpected rock stars out there; and he’s becoming one heck of a studio engineer.

A Deeper Understanding is one of the best happy-sad albums I’ve ever heard; I want to be soul-crushed by the words. Instead, I just find myself healing through the music, so layered and perplexingly charging forward. Live in Denver, they shifted on a dime into the album’s gem, “Clean Living”, and I counted a half dozen fans crying just in my right balcony section. If there’s a more consistently excellent American band right now, I’d love to know.

Capacity

I especially wore out Big Thief’s Capacity, which has what must be the finest song ever recorded about Great White Sharks (that’s what it’s called, too). It’s a tight and profound punch, pop-tinged and literary at once, with reflections on love, gender, and growing up in a transforming time and place. I’m sure Big Thief will have a lot of hype going into their next release. I am excited to see if they can make music as beautiful as one of my favorite songs all year.

City Music

And then there’s the album I probably, at the end of the day, will want 2017 to be remembered by – Kevin Morby’s City Music. In the simplest form, City Music still gives me shivers on what must be my 100th listen through. It’s a uniquely American album, literally made for listening while walking through American streets and squares.

Morby, the newest new Dylan, doesn’t shy away from Big Ideas, and quite often he puts a halo over them.  Especially check out the back-to-back City Music  tracks  “Pearly Gates,”  where Morby is asking for a song to borrow “in his time of sorrow.”

Take it how you want, but this seems to be the perfect rallying cry for social justice, perhaps in St. John’s Divine, where candles “held every name but mine.” This goes right into “Downtown Lights”, where time flies, like a “spaaaarow.”

It sure does. And it sure will. So cherish this music and all that moved you in 2017.

May 2018 be even better.