My 10 Favorite Albums Of 2021
For the first time in about 15 years, I’ve listened to enough new music to write about my 10 favorite albums released and enjoyed over the last year. With my kid back in school, but my day in ex-househusband/joint-custody-stay-at-home dad limbo (nothing like an ongoing pandemic to make grabbing the career bull by the horns seem absurd), I’ve had the time to throw intriguing new albums in a massive playlist, shuffle and investigate it, and see what sticks around.
Whether due to age or isolation, I do not - however - have much to say about the state of music in 2021. I abandoned the Top 40 around the time I became a stay-at-home dad. Album release week deluges and streaming era absurdities like two Perry Como songs in the top 20 every winter is too much nonsense for a romantic seeking the Casey Kasem experience. I accept why Billboard can no longer combine radio and sales into a coherent narrative of current popular taste, and I wouldn’t even say that’s a bad thing culturally. But, thankfully, I don’t have to stare at the evidence if I don’t want to. As much as I love the popular song, I didn’t really exist in a world of new “singles” last year. Or movie theaters. Or bars. Or ride apps. Just albums, a couple tv shows, fan-made Numberblock videos, stuff on my phone and artifacts of the past. Ah, well.
Despite my renewed interest in the hypothetical and literal long player, I found no reason to spend time with “relevant” new albums that didn’t appeal or resonate, assessing them for either personal worth or artistic merit. No one’s paying me to do so, either for cultural edification or search-engine optimization. It’s a relief to just say “I haven’t gotten around it,” “it didn’t grab me on first listen,” or - at worst - “not my tempo.” That said, if you'd like to pay me to learn and opine about boy bands the size of athletic teams, the meta-memoirs of narcissistic superstars and alleged “rappers” who flip the “that’s not music, that’s just talking!” trope to Generation X’s chagrin, do holler. I’m not above it.
I still have 100 hours of music in my 2021 albums-of-interest playlist to be sussed, so expect some hearty addenda to this list in the months to come. But here’s some blurbage about ten of the thirtyish-and-counting albums released in 2021 that get a bonafide thumbs-up from me so far. In descending order of enthusiasm.
- Low, HEY WHAT
As I’ve proven in this take-bucket throughout the year, I came to HEY WHAT with a whole lot of enthusiasm and interest in the work of this middle-aged Minnesota twosome. It’s truly difficult for me to imagine how this music sounds to someone who stopped paying attention to Low in the ‘00s or the ‘90s, let alone the completely uninitiated. I have fantasized about Robert Christgau deigning to acknowledge them for the first time since their Christmas EP over twenty years ago, with two asterisks and a tolerant Politically conscious Gen X would-be-empty-nesters get through lockdown with lots of ambient and The Cure. Even if you can’t relate, who can blame them? (“Days Like These,” “I Can Wait”). It’s also possible he’d drop a newly enthusiastic A or is politely sitting on a relatively dismissive B. But I'm not gonna write in to find out.
So if that italicized description sounds like an A to you, get on board already! They’ve been delivering mature, beautiful, songful noise (noiseful song?) so consistently for the last decade they got their first Grammy nomination this time! Admittedly for best engineering, but maybe your old ass knows how important engineering is.
2. Courtney Barnett, Things Take Time Take Time
The kind of third album where some fans mutter about the lack of evolution, and others see the digging in as essential. I’m definitely in the latter group, tickled by the implications of nine slightly unique shades of blue on the cover. Hearing an Australian guitarist circling 30, resolutely committed to the post-Pavement sound of slightly flanged strums and affectedly off-hand vocals, my initial response to her work was “I gave in college.” But she kept at it, and I gradually grasped how her straightforward, post-therapy take on depressive slackerdom would have been unthinkably unobtuse back in the day. I don’t blame critics recoiling from the seeming slightness of this album, released three years after her admittedly slight sophomore slump. But I hear a gorgeous distillation of her aesthetic, one of gentle encouragement, soulful concern, tempered frustration and love. The Velvet Underground if taking it day by day was more important than asking the big questions, and if the White Light/White Heat it was responding to was provided by life itself.
3. Yola, Stand For Myself
The attempts of young black women to break into the country market is a big news hook right now, and I have nothing but respect for the artists and writers whose relationship with the genre makes this a passionate cause. But I didn’t even know Yola was a Bristol-born, Massive Attack guest vocalist when I suspected this album was modern soul unafraid to lean into country sounds for a zuzz, rather than an attempt to zuzz country with soul. While producer Dan Auerbach’s band The Black Keys has a content problem, Yola sure doesn’t. “Everybody’s saying that it’s going to be alright/ but I can’t help but wonder if it’s going to be on my dime” kicks off the first single, which still manages to be uptempo. Most of the album is more romantically minded, Auerbach and band giving Yola a sumptuous Hi-Rhythm update to slink around and shout over. Whether she winds up as iconic as Al Green is someone else’s problem - I just love that she can play in his metier.
4. Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders/London Symphony Orchestra, Promises
I like jazz now! After trying so hard in my twenties, I genuinely do! Sorta. I still have a hard time with the player-centric bop format, enough that a head could rightfully retort “no, you like fusion.” And In A Silent Way does mean more to me than Kind Of Blue at the moment, it’s true. I have enough to taste to flinch at call-waiting cliches, but I’m into it for soulful soundscaping rather than complicated instrumental expression. Promises is basically a legendary tenor saxophonist threading his thing in and out of an ambient arranger's thing, with strings. It’s the kind of work that gets called “timeless” because heads would be thrilled to find something similar in a used bin, and naturally the world has responded to its warm pleasures by making it The One Jazz Album You Have To Hear In 2021. I’m in no position to say how common or uncommon an accomplishment this is for the world of “ambient jazz,” but I'm confident it's a lovely, meditative exercise.
5. Dawn Richard, The Second Line
Where I came to HEY WHAT with an auteurist’s appreciation of Low’s career, I came to The Second Line knowing jack shit about Dawn Richard other than that other people have an auteurist’s appreciation of her career. The word “Diddy” kept me from spending time with Diddy Dirty Money, and I wasn’t paying attention to anybody’s artpop in the decade that followed. But it’s the 2020’s, ex-members of Danity Kane are now veteran R&B producers releasing luscious tributes to electro on Merge, and I’m paying attention. The Second Line shifts dramatically from synth backdrop to synth backdrop like The-Dream at his finest, blending hip-hop confidence with R&B carnality like Missy Elliott at her finest. Someone else can tell you how it compares to her breakthrough ‘10s trilogy. Though I should go and find out before too long.
6. Erika de Casier, Sensational
A funny thing about getting older has been realizing that sounds I associate with the cutting edge of American black pop are now the domain of 4AD signees raised in Denmark (yes, His Name Is Alive was bridging that gap twenty years ago, but still). Just as Generation X misuses the term “yacht rock” because they can’t say “oldies,” millennial Robyn acolytes have a hard time saying “adult contemporary” instead of “pop-R&B,” even though the sonic signifiers are more than twenty years old. If this talk gets your back up, and you’d just like someone to describe post-app romance over the same sounds that soundtracked your AIM chats, check this album out.
7. Topaz Jones, Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Mama
I don’t really know how to measure cultural relevance anymore. This album is the soundtrack of a concept film narrated by Black Thought of the Roots, but the guy doesn’t have a wikipedia page? It won a Special Jury Recognition for Visionary Storytelling at SXSW, but Jones has less than 10k followers on Twitter? Supposedly he had a “hit” in 2016? He’s from Montclair, New Jersey and proud of it? I’m not in a rush to watch the movie, though, because I find the reflections and sounds on this album more than meaty enough. The popping drum loops and warm samples make me want to reference that era where David Chapelle was throwing block parties and friends of Kanye like Rhymefest and Talib Kweli had a chance at crossing over. But the energy here feels way less didactic and trepidatious than I remember from those guys. Granted, I’m now older than the guy rapping about his skills, his early days and his values. I just hear someone trying to chronicle his life and his community atop music that conveys its richness and joy.
8. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, New Fragility
I know, right? You probably didn’t hear about it, but the band who managed first-album Next Big Thing hype despite not being on a label has dropped what sure sounds like a “go big or go home” attention grab despite not being on a label. I’m shocked there wasn’t a Launay or a Lillywhite or a Lanois helping out on this grand reclamation of Alec Ounsworth’s unapologetic warble, which more than ever sounds like Gordon Gano going for it Bono-style. There’s even a song called “CHYSY, 2005” where the violins come in like Davids Byrne and Bowie are still watching blog bands from the balcony. Your mileage may vary greatly on this one, but I was raised watching Rod Stewart unabashedly get his on VH1, and I love when aging indie bands go for the brass ring.
9. Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Barn
Agnostic and unmoved by Neil’s songwriting for over a decade (the glory of his rowdy folk covers on Americana underlining the issue), I initially assumed the enthusiasm for this one was just gratitude for the backing band & brevity. And while the familiar Talbot/Molina clomp and ten songs clocking in at 42 minutes instead of 50-90 are soothing details, they’re symptoms of the improvement rather than the cause. Late lovers & friends were cryptically mourned on the last one, and Nils Lofgren is now settled in at shotgun (though he notably predated the prodigal Poncho in Crazy Horse, he was still away from the band longer than I’ve been alive). The bandleader was glad to see his bros after a year of lockdown, and this is an album with life on the mind rather than death. “Human Race” shows they can still storm and stomp in defense of ordinary people. “Don’t Forget Love” shows they can still mewl earnest valentines like beaten down Bee Gees. But the acceptance of uncertainty on “They Might Be Lost” is new (“Well the jury is out on the good old days, you know/ the judgment is soon coming down/ I can’t quite remember what it was that I knew”). His best album since the one about electric cars, if not the rock opera about hippie farmers.
10. Devin The Dude, Soulful Distance
The unassuming genius and subtle ambition of his first three albums failing make him more than a modest critical favorite, Devin stopped trying so hard and I stopped paying attention. So I can’t tell you how this one compares to Suite 420, Acoustic Levitation or his reunion with the Coughee Brothaz. But I’m thrilled to hear the Marvin Gaye of Rap-A-Lot hasn’t lost the casual assurance of his voice, still slipping from straight rap to a sly sing-song without a drop of sweat. The songs show up and leave rather than swerve around and surprise you like they did twenty years ago, but he's treating us to his luxurious sense of vibe and detail throughout. Refusing to lose his cool or his life, he accepts the need for six feet of “soulful distance” and does his thing.