The Home Key #17

This was a remarkable year for music. And considering that we are observing, in slow motion, a crisis with respect to how musicians formulate a career—in a tech-controlled marketplace—this is really saying something. Most of what passes for popular music, where the streaming profits are preeminently generated, may principally concern women’s bodies or involve threats of bodily harm to other musicians, and the post-historical conditions of certain genres (viz., “rock” music and “hip hop”) are now fully on display, and yet: while we would expect it would all be bubblegum and laptop beeps, no! Especially jazz and field recording-inflected albums, drones, and “new” classical music seem especially vital to me, while rock, folk, and Americana continue to generate passion away from the spotlight of mass media attention. And: listen to all these bands! It seems that while the model for contemporary music is usually an unwashed guy in his room tuning up his soft synth and his banal four-on-the-floor drum machine, nonetheless there are still some really great bands to be found. Musicians who might play live! How do they possibly rehearse? Who will put up with that noise? How do they move all that equipment? For me, perhaps nothing says our-form-is-not-dead like a bunch of musicians playing in a room together. These musicians live in hope! They embody hope! See below! (In no particular order.)

Idles, Tangk Sort of my favorite “new” band, “new “defined as forming and/or releasing stuff after the breakup of Hüsker Dü. “Band” defined as requiring this very group of people in order to do the work. This album, Tangk, is far more melodic than earlier Idles music, angrier and higher impact as a result. The gentler spots make the louder passages stand out. And: I don’t really mind if Idles’ politics don’t pass your Lefty purity test—it doesn’t have to be about the purity test. I bet Gang of Four wouldn’t pass that test now either. Don’t go to musicians for all your political messaging. Most of them never finished college.

The Smile, Wall of Eyes Incredibly, this band released two albums this year! They’re both great, but the second one (Cutouts) does feel somewhat more like a Thom Yorke solo album. I am not really interested in a Thom Yorke solo album, and I am not entirely preoccupied with Radiohead (they are a fine “singles” band). What I love about The Smile is how the drums work and also I love those unpredictable Greenwood riffs. So West African! The best songs by this band amount to Greenwood/Skinner workouts with some singing about existentialist something or other over the top. Like on “Under Our Pillows” or “Read the Room.” In these cases, they, The Smile, see right into you. And then the riff comes around again.

Beyoncé, Cowboy Carter Not a country album, really, but a catalogue of all the American popular musics. And all of that without ever compromising on what a Beyoncé record sounds like, with its surpassingly glossy harmonies. These remind you that gospel precedes both rock and roll and the “country” music of the present. The broken United States of America needed this album (see “American Requiem,” e.g., for a premonitory composition about the maelstrom we’re heading into right now). This album is great the way Innervisions by Stevie Wonder was great—it hears everything, it needs everything, and yet it’s totally original.

Keith Richards, “I’m Waiting for My Man” A perfect marriage of musician and cover. Keith talks so much trash about other musicians that it’s especially moving when he admires somebody else’s song, as he seems to here. There’s no solo in the middle where the solo would go in a Stones song. And the drums are tribal, oversimplified, and he fudges the entrances on the ones, just like Lou Reed would, but for all that it’s a Keith Richards song, and a dirty lowdown one at that.

John Lurie, Music from Painting with John I loved the television show, I love the man, and even though he can’t make music in the same ways as he used to—during his Lounge Lizards time—this album still hums with his vibrative singularity and difference It speaks up into the heavens, with an awestruck beauty. John’s musical releases are only occasional now, but still so moving.

Einstuzende Neubaten, “Ist Ist” Just in case you forgot about them.

The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis This is my favorite album of the year. The earlier Messthetics stuff was great, too, bigger than the resume of any participant, but I sometimes felt like Anthony Pirog, the guitarist, got torn between soloing and accompaniment. His role was sort of impossible. All of that changes with an additional lead instrument. And what a lead instrument. A saxophone! James Brandon Lewis seems like he can play in any idiom, but when he really wails, he calls forth the free wing of jazz, John Gilmore or Eric Dolphy or similar, which he can evidently do over a rock rhythm section without undue music-historical conflict at all. Even more so, Lewis brings a bit of swing to the melodies, so that they are less overreliant on the rock tropes. At the same time, he and Pirog, when stating the melodies in unison (or harmony) are just gorgeous together, intuitive. After which they can each solo with wild imagination. Pirog, freed of the entirety of melodic obligation, unreels some really antic, vibrant, solos, Lewis even more so. The record, as a result of all its ensemble innovation, covers so much terrain and is confident and warm and catchy all at once, without ever once being obvious. This is a band that is really thinking like a band right now, with a mighty, mighty bass and drum combination that is both sophisticated and muscular. They surf across all these genres without losing purpose. What a great, urgent, moving, inexhaustible album, a real candidate for one of the best jazz albums of the decade.

Waxahatchee, Tigers Blood Somehow I missed the Katie Crutchfield phenom earlier, and maybe because I have despaired about music from the American South, with its flag-waving and jingoism, and avoided by reason of prejudice. As always, though, a negation is the site of an incipient affirmation, and along comes this album whose virtue is not only in its perfect tunefulness, its sense of melody and indebtedness to a country(ish) idiom, but, most interestingly, there is the punk-oriented unvarnishedness that still inheres in the words. I guess it’s because Crutchfield came from the punk/indie rock world early on. So: this album is not overly indebted to Emmylou or Lucinda. It seems instead to have more to do with great postpunk singer-songwriters, not all of them women at all. And the song that most effectively does the job here, is “Right Back to It,” a complex bit of incision as regards trying to make relationship dynamics work when you don’t think you want to. Also, it would be half the thing it is, this song, if not for the extraordinary harmony singing by MJ Lenderman, of whom more below. Lenderman matches Crutchfield’s line lengths perfectly, like they sang on the same mic almost, though I bet they didn’t. He makes a very difficult task (the lower harmonic line) sound effortless. The harmonies just rise up. And if you want to see an incredible live rendition watch the Late Show performance of “Right Back to It.” Crutchfield gives off this self of contradictions–sad, yearning, knowing, resolute. This song could save marriages for how completely it tells a truth.

Shabaka, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace The last Sons of Kemet album (which also featured Tom Skinner, now drumming for The Smile), Black to the Future, was a howl of a thing, combining what is a most popular jazz posture of our time, a reformulated “spiritual jazz,” with a raw, confrontational, Black-identity-oriented, vocal/lyrical arc. It was sort of Last Poets mixed up with Max Roach and later Sonny Rollins, including some reggae. It was fierce and indelible. But one thing that seemed to happen thereafter was that Shabaka Hutchings, a bandleader in Sons of Kemet, seemed to disenchant in the matter of the saxophone. The reasons, in the accessible media, are somewhat obscure. And maybe these reasons are not ours to pry into. But his disenchantment seems to have led in part toward his more individuated solo albums of 2023-2024. (He also played on Andre 3000’s “spiritual jazz” album of last year.) This recording before us is pastoral, clarinet- and flute-oriented, exceedingly quiet in spots. It stretches toward classical music some, or toward soundtrack-scaled composition, sometimes away from jazz intervals and modulations. And yet unlike a lot of “spiritual jazz” it feels genuinely spiritual, backwardly-focused, toward Africa, toward vernacular and local musics. The lyrical results of all this investigation are a delight. And: this is another example of how creative British jazz is right now. Really creative! (Shabaka released an EP at the end of the year too, Possession, which I haven’t entirely heard yet.)

Water Damage, In E The title is a nod to Terry Riley, but E is a key that Glenn Branca favored too. Hey, this is a sludge-rock drone masterpiece such as few have attempted since the time of Faust (the German band, not the poem.). I think this came from Texas, which is both incredible and also deeply appropriate. The last album by Water Damage was, well, similar, but the addition of violin brings that Tony Conrad or John Cale flavor into the proceedings.

Orville Peck/Willie Nelson, “Cowboys are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other” Now more than ever.

Mdou Moctar, Funeral for Justice Another best band in the world. Even though it’s really all about the man, Moctar himself, the sound has been undeniably refined by the current rhythm section, now seasoned from a long period of playing/residing in the United States. The intense ensemble playing now has a rock and roll flavor even though the subjects are still all Tuareg. One way of saying it would be: this is the best rock and roll band on earth. It’s all ritual and uprising and the way the bass and drums synchronize. That said, I put them on the list last year, too. Right now everything Moctar does is great. It’s sort of all one composition—about injustice. A really great composition.

Slash, Orgy of the Damned Now, in all honesty, I detest Guns ‘n Roses. They never wrote a single song that spoke to me, not in any way, and the heroin chic vibe was juvenile, and Axl’s voice sounds like someone’s embittered grandma complaining. As a result, I have never felt entirely interested in the guitar stylings of Saul Hudson. (Though I do like the top hats.) He has always seemed to play out of some lead guitar playbook, hitherto existing, every gesture already codified. How then to describe the giddy, glitzy, Hollywood joy of this album, in which Saul Hudson covers some blues classics, and some soul music (!), with a showoffy array of vocalists (Iggy Pop, e.g.). Look, it’s not really a blues album, it’s a rock and roll album, the form that is always already bastardized, from the very beginning, impure, fake, performative, mongrelized, campy. The form that has already arrived at its stroke-related decease and is therefore free. And yet this album, by pushing against blues-rock rigidities, with a weird anti-pentatonic scale here and there, or a solo that plainly has too much wah, or a song selection that is often non-canonical (“Awful Dream,” by Lightnin’ Hopkins, e.g.), gets somewhere really frothy and (ir)reverent, and by the time you get to Demi Lovato singing “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” you are surprised to encounter here a thing never once managed by Guns ‘n Roses, the band of self-destructive narcissists: emotional complexity. Maybe Saul Hudson is now simply old enough to play this form called the blues with adult credibility, or maybe he’s just tired of the Axl Rose borderline-personality-disorder traveling show—but every time I play this Saul Hudson solo album I feel the work of someone who cares about this music. I laugh, I feel the spooky tingle of the old America, the fist in my chest of blues-inflected trouble. Not bad for a guy from a hairspray metal band.

Shellac, To All Trains Steve Albini could not keep his mouth shut, that is part of his legacy, and the provocations were always art historical/ideological no matter how calibrated to antagonize. He believed in something, and he never really stopped believing. And this album is exactly like that. Loud, uncompromising, American, punk, edgy. The recording, which seems to have an overdub nowhere in sight, is just three people playing in a room. It bludgeons you. And to think he made this music in his sixties, right before his death is a bit, well, amazing and sad. We should all be so uncompromising.

Meridian Brothers, Mi Latinamerico Sufre Well, this is not really a band at all, but rather another project from the ever unpredictable Colombian big bang of a musican named Eblis Alvarez. Sometimes he sounds like Fela Kuti, sometimes he sounds like Captain Beefheart, sometimes he sounds like King Tubby, but his grooves are infectious in whichever guise. This music just really surprises me, every time, and also, you know, induces dancing.

Wilco, Hot Sun Cool Shroud Best Wilco music in some years! Especially the song called “Annihilation.” They’re a rock band again! And by the way they also recently released (on Spotify) the NYC version (mix) of a classic from one of their very best albums, A Ghost Is Born. Yes, it’s the 2003 guitar freakout version (my technical term) of “Handshake Drugs.” A recording of sinewy brutality. I happen to have the tiniest additional insight into this song, this version of this song, owing to the fact that it was played for me, when brand new, by Jeff Tweedy himself, at the very mixing board where it was recorded, not long after completion. I was, in those days, writing a piece about Wilco for their book (The Wilco Book), early in my music writing period. I was kind of green. Jeff invited me to the studio to hear some new stuff, which they were recording right next door to the Dianetics Center in NYC. It wasn’t so routine that I got to do such a glamours thing, go to the studio, so I went over there (nervously, awkwardly) and Jim O’Rourke was there, sitting at the mixing board, with a look for me of the who-the-fuck variety, and notwithstanding Jeff played me the guitar freakout version of “Handshake Drugs,” which I really, really loved, a lot, it felt really NYC in that way that, e.g., that Neil Young’s 1989 Hit Factory recordings are really NYC (try listening to “On Broadway” again!). It was beautiful and menacing in equal parts. I told Jeff Tweedy that it was like a Wilco version of “Marquee Moon.” Which maybe he liked hearing a little? I honestly don’t know. Anyway, it still kind of sounds that way to me, more punk and more sublime than the album version, which contrasts drug stuff with a light, acoustic tone. Of course, Jeff had a lot more vital opinions to solicit than mine, Jim O’Rourke, for example, and soon I was back out on Times Square, going home. But now you can listen to this recording for yourself. “Hot Sun Cool Shroud” also has some of the motorik groove of that early version of “Handshake Drugs,” including, on the title track, a guitar solo that totally apes Jeff’s skronky “handshake” guitar performance. And: A Ghost Is Born, which I always thought was about—maybe in part—Jeff’s period of addiction, also features what I think of as the single best Wilco song ever, “Hell Is Chrome,” which I imagine Jeff also played for me that day in the studio, though I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, maybe I just wish it were so.

Deerhoof, The Free Triple Live Album These days, I have an anxiety that Deerhoof are going to dissolve. Greg, the drummer and bandleader has alluded to a “restlessness” as regards his work with the Deerhoof camp. And yet this is an excellent (and free) album compiled of their more recent songs with the mean and astringent two-guitar version of Deerhoof (Ed Rodriguez and John Dieterich) that has quietly become one of the best such guitar collaborations since Verlaine and Lloyd. Plus the drums are a lead instrument. Plus: this band has one of the great contemporary bass players and singer/dancers in Satomi Matsuzaki. I hope this is not valedictory but the opening of a next chapter, because, well, this is one of the best bands in the world.

John Cage/Aaron Dilloway, Rozart Mix This is a recasting of John Cage’s original piece for 88 tape loops (made for Alvin Lucier in 1965). The medium was radio. The original performance post-dated Cage’s earlier labor-intensive pieces for tape by a decade or more. Dilloway reproduces the experiment from the original instructions in this moment of history (2024), where the looping and sampling is easier. What the Cage tape pieces feel like now is: incredibly contemporary. Especially with the vitality of field recording now, which feels, functionally, exactly like music, the Cage tape pieces with their heavy short-wave radio buffet are right smack in the middle of the contemporary. This isn’t a repertory piece, I mean, it’s a glorious example of how we make music now.

Linda Thompson, Proxy Music Implies Linda’s voice without using it. (Others fill in for her in this her ongoing struggle with dysphonia.) You still feel her here everywhere.

Suss, Birds and Beasts You may not know this band, which is sort an ambient ensemble that uses country and western instrumentation to get there. They are unique, cinematic, somewhat dark, very unusual. I’ve been following them for a couple of albums, and with this record they feel like they have unilaterally arrived, which is perhaps curious, as they lost a core member, their keyboardist, who passed away suddenly and only plays on one piece. His is the epic last piece, a beautiful creepy thing that does what this band does in a singular way—it combines, say, harmonica and synthesizer and pedal steel. And, strange fact: a core member of Suss was behind early eighties synth/country crossover band Rubber Rodeo, a fave of mine in my college time.

Gastr del Sol, We Have Dozens of Titles A long overdue compilation, sparkling in its scale, by one of the very best and most thoughtful indie bands of the Drag City scene. These songs are even better than you remember.

Off!, Free LSD Not materially different from other Off! releases, but apparently their last. Eventually all the attempts to revive or rehabilitate the idea of Black Flag and its procedural discourse will peter out and we can evaluate, then, because Black Flag will be, at last, a relic. When that happens this band, Off!, will be a leading edge, almost as good as the early run of Black Flag, and better than all the post-historical versions, including ones with Greg Ginn in them.

MJ Lenderman, Freedom Manning See above. The It Boy of contemporary Americana-inflected shambolic-rock makes an album that is great and sad at once. He only sounds like Neil Young’s ditch period occasionally.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Woodland I am of the opinion that after “I Dream a Highway,” an opus from Time (The Revelator), which is one of the very greatest songs ever written, Gillian Welch found it much harder to make the lyrics. The song was so good that there was nowhere to go afterward. (Someday I will write an entire essay on “I Dream a Highway.”) Thus the very, very long delay between albums by Gillian Welch these days. One solution would be: to let her incredibly talented partner David Rawlings, lead guitarist here, do more of the heavy lifting. It’s not a Gillian Welch album, then, except that Woodland is occasionally just that. It’s also a duo album. A great one.

Jolie Holland, “War Pigs” A spooky and powerfully affecting string arrangement of the Sabbath classic, which was homemade in this instance especially for the desolate November political apocalypse. Maybe if it had all turned out differently this recording would seem quaint or overly reactive. But no. This seems to be describing our Incel Nation precisely as it is. I heard the live version on Patreon, but a studio version follows shortly in the new year. Stay tuned.

The Cure, Songs of a Lost World Also perfectly timed. There might be a throwaway song or two on here. I’m still digesting. But in general it’s the most unapologetic and complete “rock album” anyone has made in years. Self-conscious as such, but still. And deeply mournful, as Robert Smith has likewise been at inflection points in the past. Also featuring the best use of bass guitar in a rock setting since Peter Hook still played with New Order.

The Hard Quartet This is all about the drums, really, supporting my contention that Pavement was never perfect after Gary Young retired. But, also, even though I think the secret weapon of Pavement is Spiral Stairs, it’s really good to hear another guitarist push Stephen Malkmus to do more, aim higher. In a way he’s not the best player in this ensemble, which is very much a band. It must be hard for him, but the results are right here to be heard. Try “Rio’s Song,” if you haven’t already.

Max Richter, In a Landscape The two records I have listened to most in my life are Music for Airports by Brian Eno and Sleep by Max Richter. The effects are similar. Yet for a long while I resisted Max Richter, even actively disliked him, thinking that a conventional criticism of Richter—that he is excessively pretty—was exactly right. For example, I felt like there was too much Vivaldi in his refractory piece about The Four Seasons. All of this changed, suddenly, when I lived in Providence, in 2020, in a period in which a student I had been working with, a thesis student of mine, died. He was just a kid. A science fiction writer. And he wanted to write his thesis (with me) because he suspected, I think, that it would be what he could most proudly leave behind. This student had a juvenile cancer that in the majority of cases is not fatal. But sometimes it is. He had been in and out of the hospital in the two years I worked with him, and at one point he was gone for a whole semester recuperating. Then he came back to RI, relapsed, went home again, and in the last semester of his schooling, I met with him on Zoom (from California). Sometimes, even often, he was in the hospital. He’d looked worn out from the treatments in RI, but back in CA, in his last days, he was ghostly, but still funny. To my shame, I told him that he wasn’t really rewriting enough, which he wasn’t. (When I want to go on one of those disliking myself jags, I often start by remembering this.) He deeply wanted to get down a big chunk of the first draft, about two superhero guys fighting over some lever, atop a mountain, which, if levered in one irreversible direction, would cause the end of the world. It was all metafiction and in-joke, like if Robert Coover, whose office was just down the hall, had written a superhero novel. Anyway, my student wrote the eighty pages or so that was required for his thesis, and as far as I knew he graduated, and then a month or so later, his mother told me that he had died. In a way, I just could not accept this. I could not accept such a great, likable oddball of a young person, with so much life ahead, could die in this way, for this reason, though I suppose it happens every day. I had known young adults who died, people who took their own lives, and so on. I should have been prepared, but I was not. Somehow from my vantage point of middle age, this death seemed impossible to accept. This student believed in writing. He used writing for the thing that writing is for: the leaving behind a perception of life and being. Other students were sleeping through class, or not finishing assignments, or complaining about the workload. Other students didn’t know if they really wanted to write, or if they could, or if writing wanted anything to do with them. But my thesis student wrote as if his life depended on it. There was no conflict about writing. So: the first morning in which I was left with the news, trying to process, I was making my son’s lunch for school, and I put on Sleep by Max Richter. I asked that fucker Alexa to play it. Do you know the first section? “Before the Wind Blows It All Away,” it’s called. I put it on, on the day I’m telling you about, and for some reason, I was completely defenseless. It’s quite minimal, more so even than other Richter pieces, many of which have a very minimal surface. It’s just a piano piece. Absolutely skeletal in some ways. There’s just nothing complicated about this piece. It’s straightforward, though it took me a while to realize it was in, I think, 3/2 not 4/4. It’s so slow that it takes a while to count to six. I thought maybe 6/8. But I checked. It’s in 3/2. And it stays in the mid-range of the piano except for these tiny single note moments above and below. I think 69 bpm, or thereabouts. Really slow! And it’s in the emptiness that something incredible happens with the piece, which changes extremely slowly, through eight different barely different permutations, amounting to something like sixteen or seventeen minutes. Pretty long, but then the whole album of Sleep is eight hours long or so. About the length of a good night’s sleep.    I became defenseless in grief, and in grief I felt this wave of compassion in the music itself. Like the real force of compassion, the origin of compassion, wanted to blow through the spaces between the piano chords in the opening section of Sleep, compassion wanted to speak without speaking exactly, reminding me that the grief, somehow, was collective, was in everything. I have had a similar experience, now and again, with music, but not very often. I had it with certain pieces by Arvo Pärt, certain pieces by Meredith Monk, with Music for Airports. A piece I know of from the first album by Jon Hassell. “Visions of Johanna.” In my defenselessness, on the day in question, which I guess involved a kind of revelation, I could no longer think of Richter as being “too pretty.” Rather he exhibited exactly the right portion of beauty, as measured in this compassion essence I’ve described. Thereafter, I went back and listened to, more or less, everything he has done, and he has done a lot of things (some of which, like movie soundtracks, e.g., feel less polished or believed in), some of which amount to a sort of perfection, and some which are merely quite good. Sleep, to me, is the ne plus ultra of Max Richter, and partly because the conceptual apparatus is faultless. He inquires into what an album is, he inquires into what classical music is, he pushes against the idea of the attentive audience (they are encouraged to sleep), and he prises loose the idea of a “composition,” because he constantly remixes and reuses bits of melody already heard, rearranges, remixes, re-records bits, so that it’s not always a different piece, just a slightly different iteration. There’s presque vu everywhere. Sometimes, I think that the conceptual perfection of this piece, Sleep, which is not always exhibited by every other Richter piece, must come from the fact that he is married to an excellent visual artist. I have no factual basis for saying this. But it has occurred to me. I think Richter’s wife was somewhat involved in the planning stages for the performances of Sleep.    In my view Richter is perfect when the conceptual housing is perfect.    So: in something like only four or five years, Sleep has become a piece of music that I have listened to almost as much as I have listened to a Brian Eno record that came out almost fifty years ago. For a while I listened to Sleep every morning, really every single day. Almost nothing else got played unless someone else was around, or if I was needing, finally, to put aside a need to feel this grief/compassion admixture and do something productive with my life. Sometimes I would play other things just so it didn’t seem to my family that I had only this one thought about music. Thereafter, I awaited In a Landscape, this new record, in part, because I felt like Richter had made no perfectly considered recording since Sleep, and that he was overdue. I understand, of course, that one only gets to make the very fewest bits of perfection. But because Richter’s approach relies on simplicity and repetition it is reasonable to suspect he might do it again.    In a Landscape shares a title with a well-loved early piece by John Cage, a piano piece, but otherwise bears no sign of a relationship there. (The Cage piece feels like Satie, or like Japanese koto music.) At first, the Richter album feels irresolute because it doesn’t feature the gradualism of Sleep. It’s more like Richter’s early and highly esteemed album The Blue Notebooks. However: here the pieces are joined together by these little field recording tone poem thingies. Recordings, more or less, of actual places (though which recording does not feature an actual place?), somewhat collaged. These “landscapes,” if you will, constitute a new gesture, and they are the gradualism of this album. It is, really, just one piece. As others have pointed out there are spots where melodies feel repeated across the album or from Richter’s earlier oeuvre, in just the way you would hear repeated sounds in nature. Presque vu. But the discovery of the field recordings—which as I have said above is sort of the thing that is happening now: more environmentalism in sound—constitutes a new conceptual idea for Max Richter. If it’s not Sleep, this recording nonetheless has moments of solemnity and gravity. That little bit of chromaticism on “A Color Field (Holocene),” for example, or the unresolved chords in “Love Song (After JE).” It’s been a solid month with this piece of music, now, and I still think I’m only beginning to get it. Especially because Richter is already rolling out demos and alternative edits in this his theater of eternal music. I’ll check back in with an update in ten years. That’s one way you know a piece of music is working, not because you understood it in fifteen seconds, or a month, but because it took ten years. Or more.

Sun Ra Arkestra, “Lights on a Satellite” This is a pre-release single from a new Arkestra album, and it’s dazzling. The Marshall Allen Arkestra is more contemporary, joyous, and less discursive/ideological than Sun Ra’s edition, and maybe that’s because it’s thirty years later. But it’s still one of a kind. Marshall Allen is 100 years old, it bears mentioning, holy shit, and is still playing, which is just incredible, and the eruptive fire of the earlier Arkestra is undiminished by the centennial status of its leader. (I’ll update when the full album is released. And: Marshall Allen is releasing a solo album this month too. It’s kind of smooth—and yet intergalactic too.)

John Cale, “Shark-Shark” This song is like getting a fifty-year old meat slab of early Velvet Underground flung at you while you are on ayahuasca. This guy is 82 years old! Not as old as Marshall Allen, but pretty old. And this song is certainly the best thing he’s done in twenty years. I am not certain I like every song on the album from which it comes as much as I like this one, but the melodies are frequently lovely and if melody is the thing vanishing from songwriting, here is a great master to remind you what it sounds like. And if the new album is not good enough for you there is also this year a deluxe reissue of his finest solo album, Paris 1919, which comes with an entire additional disc of errata, all of it both extraneous and fascinating. By my count Cale has worked on more than ten great post-Velvets projects (Paris 1919, Fear, Church of Anthrax, The Marble Index, Fragments of a Rainy Season, Wrong Way Up, Day of Niagara, Sabotage/Live, Inside the Dream Syndicate (which is at least three volumes now), Eat/Kiss, M:Fans), and just about every other project has something very compelling on it, and he produced albums by The Stooges, The Modern Lovers, and Patti Smith. And still you just think of him as the guy who played the viola on “Heroin.”

Daniel Bachman, Quaker Run Wildfire Brian Eno is teaching a songwriting workshop somewhere soon, and he announced some themes of his workshop online and one of them (I’m paraphrasing) was “Should It Still Be Called Music?” This is a really relevant question, one that implies the categorical instability that lies behind all of the arts. I don’t believe in any of the categories. Accordingly, I don’t need for art-making that relies on hearing/audition to be “music” and I certainly don’t need for it to be “songs” or “songwriting” in order for me to be engaged fully. Daniel Bachman’s album “Quaker Run Wildfire” (a full account of which is to be found on his Bandcamp page here) is one of these recordings that does not need to be music as you understand music to be. Its purpose might be described as narrative or even pictorial—to record sound during a wildfire in Appalachia, where he lives, and to make a “musical” performance running alongside that suggests the meaning of this drama. By extension, the piece takes up Climate Crisis, because Bachman views the outbreak of fire in Appalachia as integrally related to the superheating of the forest. Daniel Bachman, you may know, is often an acoustic musician, even a traditionalist, but here his modernism is much on display, there are all kinds of editorial interventions. The result is a fascinating, sad, harrowing recording. Not easy to listen to, but very necessary. And: Bachman has been a keen critic of the ways musicians are not getting paid these days, such that I believe this recording is self-released. He well deserves some of your appreciation on Bandcamp.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, Opus Opus has been a structured absence here, on this list, until now. It’s absolutely an inspired and inspiring performance, the kind of thing you wait for lifelong and you don’t even know you’re waiting for it, a record of a human being manifestly in the performance of human being, with a last urgency of being, with a wish to record this last urgency so as to inscribe a leaving behind and all the loss that adheres thereto. I’m not going to cheapen the immensity of this piece by describing further. Go and listen.

Honorable mentions!

This Is BASIC Hooray for the Riff Raff, The Past Is Still Alive The Bad Plus, Complex Emotions Jack White, No Name John Lennon, Mind Games (The Ultimate Mixes) The Pernice Brothers, Who Will You Believe Yasmin Williams, Acadia Yannis & the Yaw, Lagos, Paris, London Mermaid Chunky, slif slaf slof George Harrison, Living in the Material World (50th anniversary) Willie Nelson, Last Leaf on the Tree Joni Mitchell, Archives, Vol IV, The Asylum Years The Necks, Bleed Galaxie 500, Uncollected Noise New York, ’88-‘90 Hannah Marcus, The Hannah Marcus Years, 1993-2004