I've Failed You, Best Albums Of 2025: Blurbing FTW 12/12/25

I have to take an L on a Favorite Albums Of 2025 post. The year got past me in terms of listening to new music, and - while I’m sure there’s 20 albums out there I could be enthusiastic about - it would be a real mad dash to find them by January. Instead, I’ll just mention them in BFTW posts if and when they’re belatedly discovered. I plan to be more observant in 2026, though! Assuming I’m not too busy or too cranky. At this age, and in this economy, it would be foolish to deny myself those outs.

An example of my grumbling: I remember enjoying FKA Twigs’ Eusexua in January, all the more intriguing as her work previously struck me as the soundtrack to a dance piece I’d find more engrossing when combined. Then she changed the album’s tracklisting slightly in November, alongside a “sequel” album, Eusexua Afterglow. This might be a thrill for the committed fan, but for someone who still needed to revisit the original if he wanted to play best-of-year games, such mutations were annoying. Unpaid labor rather than a rewarding hobby. Ironically, after abandoning the effort, I put on Afterglow and found it enjoyable as well. Likely worthy of inclusion on a best-of list on its own. Lesson learned: you can’t harvest in the fall what you didn’t plant & tend to during the year. I never got to the gym either.

Despite my lack of discipline re: self-improvement in 2025, I remain president of the Long Beach chapter of the Dylan Hicks & Small Screens fan club. In case you’ve forgotten, Hicks is a singer/songwriter and novelist who’s also dallied in music criticism (where our online mutual circles coincided). I was quite taken with Airport Sparrows, the 2022 album recorded with his sextet (sometimes nonet!), Small Screens. I flipped my lid for 2024’s Modern Flora, which expanded on Sparrows’ improvisational flights (two of the five songs are over ten minutes!) to the point where I asked in vain what precedent there was for music that provides the pleasures of both hyper-literate, romantic smarty-pop and the kind of loose, conversational jazz that legends like Paul Simon and Donald Fagen revere but weren’t humble enough to attempt. Neither the knowledgeable nor the algorithm has offered a real response.

The band's third album, Avian Field Recordings, showed up in August, just under a year after Modern Flora. Though strong, it’s their slightest by pointed default: it features instrumental tracks rather than long instrumental passages, the songs with vocals comparatively tighter. I still haven’t dug into Hicks’ decades of earlier work, so I can’t say if it’s a reversion to form or not. But there's definitely an increase of cheek: when blindsided by chintzy fusion timbres two thirds of the way through, I was tickled to discover the track was outright named “Hold Music.”

Though the near sophisti-pop of the following “Sidetrack” might sound even stronger without that prelude, Avian Field Recordings affirms the group isn’t beholden to Flora’s template, continuing to broaden its sonic toolbox. I’m psyched for whatever’s next, and implore those outside the twin cities to please, please, check this shit out. Even if just to tell me Laura Nyro tried this fifty years ago, or that you prefer chocolate and peanut butter separate, or that there’s a whole scene of post-bop groups with post-Pavement singers somewhere on the Eastern seaboard. 

I’m never one to argue that people are too soft these days. Usually, those who make the accusation are either trying to valorize trauma they shouldn’t have had to experience, or resenting consequences that are years overdue. But Quentin Tarantino…he might be able to make the claim. This is a man who first appeared in front of the camera explicitly describing Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” as a metaphor for big dick. His first appearance in a blockbuster had him angrily shouting hate-speech at Samuel L. Jackson. For the latter trespass against social etiquette, he won a screenplay Oscar. Unabashed use of dehumanizing language has remained a trademark of his oeuvre, later joined by ahistorical fantasies of violent vengeance against the ghouls of our collective past. He currently lives in Tel Aviv, which some might accordingly consider ironic. Yet somehow, it’s his willingness to publicly express disdain for the acting of Paul Dano, and passingly noting “I don’t care for Matthew Lillard,” that has social media outraged and celebrities racing to defend his targets. If Tarantino is asked to apologize for slighting The Worst Riddler or The Best Shaggy (non-“Boombastic” division), I think he’d be within his rights to suggest movie lovers have become wimpy. He could also ask why no one’s mad he dissed Owen Wilson.

If you’ve tried Slint, but think either they’re too metal or not good enough at metal, I’d make sure you’ve heard the self-titled 2000 album by The For Carnation (basically that band’s vocalist Brian MacMahan and whoever he damn well pleased). It’s the jazzy, lurching, eerily resolute side of Slint…and nothing but. Forty-some minutes of delicious dreadscape. Assuming you’re not against ooky-spooky sotto voce on principle.

Though frequently spotted against the Public Image Limited placard at used record stores, I’ve never listened to 1984’s This Is What You Want…This Is What You Get. This is due to its tarnished reputation (the songs were re-recorded to remove original guitarist Keith Levene) and how annoying I found its single, “This Is Not A Love Song,” on compilations. But I’ve grown obsessed with the four songs on 1981’s The Flowers Of Romance where John Lydon hollers about agoraphobia over Martin Atkins’ drumming, and learned Atkins was the primary producer on What You Get. Surprise! It’s terrific! I even like “Love Song” in context. That context is Lydon wheedling and wailing over thunderous, cacophonous loops he made with the future leader of Pigface. Gimme!

I can imagine why the album was disappointingly mundane for discerning ears at the time. It’s neither as boldly anti-rock as early PiL, nor as commercial a “sell-out” as Lydon would hype it. But it sounds oddly like Romeo Void thanks to flanged guitar and sax skronks, and - in 2025 - a Lydon-associated album that sounds like Romeo Void is transparently a cut above the norm. The A side is the keeper, but the B maintains the vibe.

I might have touched the FFWD button during Eileen, so I won’t give it a popcorn rating. However, if you’re wondering how Anne Hathaway, Thomasin McKenzie, Shea Whigham and Malin Ireland could be in a stylish period thriller by the director of Lady Macbeth in 2023 and nobody gave it much attention, the answer is “lots of dubious Massachusetts accents and a wildly rushed third act.”

If there's something I should hear, see, read, know, apologize for, you can alert me at anthonyisright at gmail dot com.