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thecelestialjukebox · 6 years

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Best of 2017: 10-1

10. Paramore - Hard Times:

“Hard Times,” first and foremost, is an expertly crafted retro pop song just on virtue of sonics— those marimbas! Those guitar stabs! That awkward vocoder bit! Yet it also captures something deep about the new wave material it’s cribbing from, something that many artists who’ve decided to do Talking Heads cosplay miss. On “Hard Times,” Hayley Williams, who has long been one of the best songwriters in the Alt-rock world, nails the profound sadness and fear of the best New Wave. But “Hard Times” is not just notable for how it imitates the past but in how it boldly stabs towards new sonic ground, in how it shows a Paramore that’s willing to evolve into something unrecognizable from the band that put out “Misery Business.”

9. Mount Eerie - Soria Moria:

A Crow Looked At Me is a tragedy not just because of the real life calamity that it documents but because of the thing it realizes about the nature of sorrow. A Crow Looked At Me is about the death and mourning of Geneveive Castree, yes, but it’s also about how memory betrays us, gives us nothing but shards of what once was. “Soria Moria” is where Phil Elverum explores this theme most fully, weaving together his entire life and love into a meditation on the impossible places that grief and memory drive us towards, all held together by the twin images of a mythic Norwegian castle and “Slow pulsing red tower lights/Across a distance, refuge in the dust.”

8. Marika Hackman - Time’s Been Reckless:

There are more genius hooks crammed into the four minutes of “Time’s Been Reckless” than most albums have in their entire running times. What more do you want from a power pop song? What greater joy is there than a pop song as expertly crafted as this?

7. The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die - Marine Tigers:

“Marine Tigers” is a heavy song— not just in its 4th-wave emo aesthetics and massive guitar riffs or its seven minute length, but in the density of its lyrics, which weave together fragments of the immigrant experience both political and personal into a meditation on what it means to be foreign. Yet any song this heavy needs something deeply vulnerable and open in it to survive— otherwise, it’s just dull— and “Marine Tigers” finds that moment in its midsection, as the eerie sustained guitar and synth lines fall away for riffs more delicate and the snare drops out entirely and the thing we’re left with it is just the simple declaration of defiant existence, repeated over and over again: “We’re here/I told you so.”

6. Vince Staples - Big Fish:

Vince Staples’ Big Fish Theory is one of those obvious masterpieces of an album, an album that commits so deeply to its aesthetic, equal parts submerged and metallic, that it can use its specificity to make universally powerful moments. “Big Fish,” the album’s pseudo-title track, is the most compelling moment on an album that’s full of them— it’s the easiest demonstration of Vince Staples’ appeal as a rapper who can move between intensity and levity. Just take the opening of the second verse:

“It's funny I was going crazy not too long ago

Women problems every morning like the Maury show

Swimming upstream while I'm tryna keep my bread

From the sharks make me wanna put the hammer to my head

At the park politickin' with the kids

Tryna get em on a straight path, got the lames mad

Know they hate to see me make cash, got the space dash

In the foreign with the GPS addressed to your mama house”

Vince delivers these lines with his characteristic flow, an almost mechanical method that lends his punchlines, like the literal “your mom” joke that ends this passage, a certain ambiguity. His best material is unnerving in that respect, in how you can’t ever tell fully how serious he is about any proposition, but it’s also thrilling.

5. St. Vincent - Hang On Me / Slow Disco:

“Hang On Me” and “Slow Disco” are two equal and opposite forces, beginning and ending MASSEDUCTION with a desperate, pleading cry for companionship and an equally desperate act of abandonment. Both songs are bare, at least by St. Vincent’s typically maximalist standards, pairing Annie Clark’s vocal performances with just simple strings-and-synth arrangements that stick to slow, elegiac riffs. And in the open space left on these tracks, she delivers the two greatest vocal performances of her career, aching and raw in ways she never has been before.

4. Lil Uzi Vert - XO TOUR Llif3:

On paper, it’s easy to dismiss “XO TOUR LLif3” as just another pop-trap novelty song, a faux-edgy earworm of a hook about dead friends with no song supporting it. After all, Lil Uzi Vert dropped it on SoundCloud unceremoniously last February on the short stopgap mixtape “Luv is Rage 1.5”, and only gave it a commercial release after the song became inescapably popular on that platform. Yet as soon Uzi’s voice starts to croak over TM88’s cyber-goth beat, it’s clear why “XO TOUR LLif3” is special. Cloaked in layers of autotune that nevertheless serve to accentuate the raw human emotion of his performance, the Philadelphia rapper slurs his lines together, starting and stopping and fragmenting himself towards incomprehensibility. It’s strange to see “XO TOUR LLif3” as some anthem, a song of the summer, when in itself it is not just personal but an invocation of the sheer loneliness and untranslatability of feeling. The line that everyone focuses on here is “all my friends are dead, push me to the edge,” which admittedly is one hell of a unique hook, but it’s in the song’s second verse (roughly speaking) that the song reveals its heart, a swirling mess of megalomania and fear: “I cannot die because this my universe.”

3. Lorde - The Louvre:

The first part of “The Louvre” is already among the best work on Lorde’s messy, wonderful Melodrama. Lorde expertly captures the uncertainty and passion of a young romance in the song’s lyrics, which shift constantly from long, languid bits of poetry like “Well, summer slipped us underneath her tongue/Our days and nights are perfumed with obsession” to casual, conversational lines like “They’ll hang us in the Louvre/Down the back, but who cares—still the Louvre.” The beat, produced by Flume and Malay (who also contributed to many of the best bits of Frank Ocean’s Blonde) also contributes to this feeling of ambiguity, rising and falling and rising again from simple guitar strums to the burbling mass of synths that Lorde sings the song’s final chorus over, all wistful passion. Yet the best part of “The Louvre” is in the back half, after all that is over. The song’s extended, wordless outro, anchored by a repeated guitar and synth figure, is some of the most evocative sonic storytelling of the year, an open question of a piece that hints of sun-drenched memories.

2. Japanese Breakfast - The Body Is A Blade:

“The Body Is A Blade” is a song about grief but it is not quite a sad song— instead, it feels like every other emotion but sadness is here, from a kind of wistful joy to defeat to anger finally all the way to acceptance. These feelings flow through every part of the song, from the guitars that hold the track down, slowly moving across its landscape with a deliberate sort of beauty, to the synth arpeggios that float in, unbound to the material world, in the song’s second half. In between these interlinked, kaleidoscopic parts a whole world of trauma and memory lies, brought out by Michelle Zauner’s vocal performance. Even as all these things move around her, she is steady, a force of clarity in an ambiguous and beautiful sonic world. Her lyrics, focused around the idea of survival in grief, do the same, returning again and again to the image of the body cutting through the days for the sake of staying alive.

1. Carly Rae Jepsen - Cut To The Feeling:

Pop music is both very easy and very hard to explain. The easy part is identifying all the little moving parts that work— the surf guitar in “Toxic,” for example, or the rolling drum beat on “Maps.” The hard part is in explaining how each of those functional elements, the load-bearers of a song, come together into something more. It’s easier in other genres— you can point to the virtuosity of a metal guitarist or an uber-technical rapper as the point where a song achieves greatness, or see the deeper meaning in an expertly crafted folk song or thoughtful piece of R&B— but pop is supposed to be disposable, which isn’t a bad thing, really, but makes finding its critical value more difficult.

“Cut To The Feeling” makes the hard part easy. “Cut To The Feeling” is not quite the best pop song of all time but is certainly the most pop pop song of all time, a throwaway (it’s a B-side to Emotion’s B-sides, consigned to a fourth-rate French animated movie) that takes its status as a throwaway as not a write-off but a mission statement. It’s supposedly a love song, just as all of CRJ’s output has been, but it’s really a song about what pop music does to you, how these little confections of synths and vocal lines develop emergent properties and actually make you feel things. “Cut To The Feeling” knows that it isn’t real, that pop music is inherently an exercise in abstractions and constructed images, but it doesn’t really care. Somewhere in the song’s build, as chugging rhythm guitar gives way to those massive synth chords, the point of the difference between the feeling itself and the shortcut the music provides is lost. “Cut To The Feeling” sounds like what it is: an ode to the power of pop music to become something ineffably more even within its limitations.

#best of 2017 #music

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thecelestialjukebox · 6 years

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Best of 2017: 20-11

20. Minimall - Static:

Literally everyone I’ve shown this song to has loved it, and it’s easy to see why— from its sunny guitar intro to its horn-driven break, “Static” is a joyous, expertly crafted slice of power pop.

19. Sun-El Musician, Samthing Soweto - Akanamali (feat. Samthing Soweto):

This bit of South African dance-pop, produced by Sun-El Musician and sung by Samthing Soweto, is the kind of song that’s so superbly relaxed that you just want to reside in its grooves, luxuriate in how hypnotically this song moves. Soweto is perhaps the most wonderful thing here, delivering a truly joyful performance— but then again the organ solo that finishes the song is also pretty damn beautiful. (also there’s apparently a lot of South African pop fandom #discourse about how bad the music video is lmao)

18. Thundercat, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins - Show You The Way:

Between this, the inexplicable Vulfpeck/Solange/Doobie Brothers live collab, and my newfound love for “I Keep Forgetting,” I’ve heard Michael McDonald’s voice way more than I thought I would this year. But while his verse is undeniably the best of the three on “Show You The Way,” deep and soulful and entirely committed to the retro aesthetics of the song, it’s not like Thundercat and Kenny Loggins aren’t worthy companions. Also, the outro contains very helpful advice regarding proper hydration, because Thundercat is a civically-minded funk star.

17. Rapsody, Kendrick Lamar, Lance Skiiiwalker - Power:

Two amazing things here: 1. in a year where Kendrick Lamar was everywhere, dropping profound, funny, and technically adept verses both on his album, his pre-album singles, and a seemingly arbitrary set of features, his best verse was on “Power,” a track from North Carolinian rapper Rapsody. 2. He’s not even the best rapper on the track— that honor belongs to Rapsody, who ties together all the varieties of power that uplift and corrupt into two compact verses full of masterful wordplay.

16. Julie Byrne - Sleepwalker:

“Sleepwalker” makes sense. There is some part of my brain that has always yearned for music that sounded like this— not just folk, stripped down and shorn of the unnecessary garnishes of most music, but folk that feels so light, not weighted down by soil or really anything else in the world. The obvious connection point is the 70s radio folk of James Taylor or Cat Stevens, but even in their cases the ties to pop idioms were clear. “Sleepwalker” isn’t bound to anything else— it sounds only like itself, sounds only like the clear and true.

15. The Mountain Goats - Shelved:

The surprising thing about “Shelved” is not that I love a Mountain Goats song about fighting desperately for your dreams in the face of an indifferent world, but instead that the part of it that I love most isn’t even sung by John Darnielle. Instead, the climax of “Shelved,” a beam of light that cracks through the icy, tense groove of ego and defiance that Darnielle builds for two and a half minutes, is delivered by the band’s bassist, long-time contributor Peter Hughes. Hughes delivers his outro over a sunny, chorused bass solo, spreading the gospel of cutting your losses and getting a day job like it’s the last hope we have.

14. Calvin Harris, Frank Ocean, Migos - Slide:

In a year of inexplicable musical happenings, perhaps the most miraculously great was “Slide,” which not only recognizes that a collaboration between Migos, Frank Ocean, and Calvin Harris didn’t need to happen and probably shouldn’t work, but even seems to revel in its own implausibility. “Slide” flows effortlessly, moving from Frank to Quavo to Offset back to Frank with grace, and in those transitions it gels into something greater, a futuristic groove beyond structure that you can just fall into.

13. Julien Baker - Appointments:

Julien Baker’s music is sad and beautiful, but not, per se, beautiful in its sadness — none of her songs valorize pain or suffering, make glamorous the things that gnaw at you and try to destroy you. “Appointments,” the lead single off her sophomore effort, “Turn Off the Lights,” is the most fully-formed thing she’s made yet; the beauties and sadnesses here are that much sharper as the arrangement builds, with her multi-tracked voice carrying her simple, effective lyrics with an honesty and clarity that very few singer-songwriters possess. Baker’s first album was lo-fi, mostly just her and her guitar, so the pianos and orchestral tinges of “Appointments” are almost jarring to hear around her. Yet the rawness and passion that Baker has always carried are heightened, not diminished by her new trappings.

12. Japanese Breakfast - Diving Woman:

“Diving Woman” sounds like the Pacific Ocean. Not just in its lyrics, which piece together the worlds of the Korean women who dive for shellfish off the coast of the island of Jeju and of Michelle Zauner, the Half-Korean woman who tours under the name Japanese Breakfast, but in all of its overwhelming sonics, all of the layers of interlocking guitars that seem to unfurl across the track and burbling synths, constant in the background. “Diving Woman” is the first track off of Japanese Breakfast’s sophomore album and it’s perhaps the purest distillation of that album’s appeal— Zauner doesn’t just tell you a story or awe you with musical heroics (although she can definitely do that— check the surprisingly arena rock riffs here), but she builds palaces of sound, rich and welcoming compositions that transport you.

11. Frank Ocean - Chanel:

Frank Ocean releasing something as casual and unimportant as “Chanel,” a song that seems to start in media res, aware of its own throwaway nature, is wonderful in itself. In the wilderness period of Frank fandom (~2012-mid2016), any rumor or fragment of the singer that could be found was scrutinized with a gnostic eye, with that desperate vision only growing with the years. Now that Blond(e) has come and gone, it seems like we can finally appreciate a Frank Ocean song simply as a song. And “Chanel” is a masterful song, showcasing Frank’s rapping and singing skills— but really more the rapping, because we already know the things his voice can do in that latter category, and I’m not sure if anyone was fully aware that he could rap a verse as effortlessly dextrous as the first one here, or one that plays with sounds as well as the second, or a boast as out there as the one about rubberbanding delta gift cards in the outro.

#best of 2017 #music

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thecelestialjukebox · 6 years

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Best of 2017: 30-21

30. Future - Incredible:

The first Future song I ever heard was “Turn On The Lights,” and so I’ve always associated him more with autotune balladry than the trap exercises he’s achieved greatest success with. So I was pleasantly surprised when he followed up FUTURE, a decent-enough collection of bangers, with HNDRXX, which showcased exactly that balladry, a week later. “Incredible” is the obvious standout of the more than two hours of music Future released this year, a track that’s charming, boastful, and vulnerable in turn, with all these moods undergirded by a minimalist, reggae-tinged beat and some of Future’s most insistent melodies.

29. Vagabon - Cold Apartment:

I saw Vagabon live and Lætitia Tamko is the smallest person with the most concentrated power within her. You can somehow tell that just from the studio recording of “Cold Apartment,” both that smallness and the potency, in how she has utter control of the song’s build— it roars around her but she roars back.

28. Kendrick Lamar - PRIDE./The Heart Part 4:

These two songs— linked by that strange, eerie sample that ends “PRIDE.” and begins “The Heart” — demonstrate one of the many contradictions of Kendrick Lamar, Greatest Rapper Alive™. He’s simultaneously a grand enough philosopher to capture your attention on “PRIDE.,” a track that’s pretty much just Kendrick talking about ethical dilemmas in plain, unadorned speech, and a daring enough stylist to captivate you on “The Heart,” which is mostly just an excuse for Kendrick to show off all of his most writerly flourishes, tying together webs of allusion and assonance. Either version of Kendrick would be a top tier rapper— we get both together at once.

27. LCD Soundsystem - oh baby:

“oh baby” invokes dreams in its first few lines, but even if it wasn’t made explicit in the text the song would still sound dreamy, its intro lulling and looping you into a trance and James Murphy’s lyrics, which are more impressionist and elemental than the normal neurotic specificity of most LCD songs, acting as some sort of lullaby.

26. Migos - T-Shirt / Big On Big:

The thing about Migos’ Culture is that a full length Migos album should not be good. They’re a singles act, first and foremost, and their prior full lengths have been scattered at best. Culture succeeded by embracing that scattered nature and transforming it into a cloak of eclectic taste— just witness the production difference between the smoky sonic mirages of Nard & B’s synth work on “T-Shirt” and the gospel-tinged virtuosity of Zaytoven’s piano on “Big on Big.” Yet both songs sound thrilling, and they provide perfect canvases for the three Migos.

25. Kesha - Praying:

First things first, Fuck Dr. Luke. But even if you didn’t know the spirit of real and powerful justice that informs “Praying,” the track would still hit like some cosmic and beautiful thing. Some have read the invocation of prayer here as ironic or purely vengeful, but the anger that suffuses Kesha’s vocal performance is a cleansing one: she wishes, more than anything, for the one who wronged her to be eradicated cleanly, both from history and from his own diseased self. To do so requires the divine, or at least a song that invokes the divine with as much grace as “Praying” does.

24. Tyler, The Creator, Frank Ocean, Steve Lacy - 911/Mr. Lonely:

fucked up that either half of 911/Mr. Lonely would make this list tbh

23. Deathless Gods with Human Bods - Tfwhollow / Jiggle:

“Tfwhollow” embraces sterility and artificiality and makes it into a thing of beauty, with Jade Matias Bell’s (who, full disclosure, I am very much in love with) vocal performance lending life to Davis Avila’s stark, clipped beat. It’s a song about isolation and being taken advantage of, and it sounds like it, sounds like trying to embrace something cold and unwelcome. On the other hand, “Jiggle” contains the lines “I SAW A MAN GETTING PUNCHED OUTSIDE A PAPA JOHNS/HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” so who can really say which is better.

22. Vince Staples - BagBak:

Vince Staples is a man of profound clarity and precision— in his interviews, in his public persona, both most of all in his music. On “Bagbak,” even as the futuristic beat burbles and intensifies, he barely raises his voice, plainly stating his vision for societal change like it’s self evident.

21. Marika Hackman - Boyfriend:

I know that every queer artist is required to make a song called “Boyfriend,” but Marika Hackman’s take is the best, a smoky mix of quivering guitars and perfectly deployed percussion that dance around her coy delivery of a witty set of lyrics.

#music #best of 2017

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thecelestialjukebox · 6 years

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Best of 2017: 40-31

40. Rostam - Gwan:

“Gwan” is an absurdly beautiful song and if it isn’t used in the climactic scenes of at least three indie dramas in the next 2 years I will be entirely disappointed in the film industry— it’s so cinematic, so expertly crafted to evoke a wistful feeling of indescribable nostalgia that blossoms into that transcendent outro, a vignette that feels like peering into the window of someone’s memories from across the street.

39. St. Vincent - Los Ageless:

Annie Clark is the only living rock star and I will accept no substitutes.

38. Jay Som - One More Time, Please / Everybody Works / The Bus Song:

I honesty couldn’t decide which of these three standout tracks from Jay Som’s Everybody Works to put here so I put them all— it’s that kind of album, a collection of songs all filled with love and specificity. Of the three, “The Bus Song” builds to the best climax and “One More Time, Please” dwells best in its hazy verses, but the moody “Everybody Works,” at times defiant and desperate, may be the best song overall.

37. Kendrick Lamar - DNA.:

Everyone knows that Kendrick Lamar’s really good at rapping, right? So let’s instead talk about how good he sounds on “DNA.,” how he’s layered and mixed and put right up against your ears, commanding every part of you to pay attention to what he has to say.

36. Tyler, The Creator - I Ain't Got Time!:

Tyler, The Creator starts this by saying “I love this sample,” which makes sense because it’s a good fucking sample. Yet Tyler’s production goes beyond just cutting up an old loop— in the song’s second half, he drops the sample entirely, instead opting for a thrilling cacophony of percussion and synths. It’s the perfect backdrop for his iconoclastic verses— just as exciting and unpredictable.

35. Freddie Gibbs - Crushed Glass:

Freddie Gibbs starts this one out by saying “The future started yesterday” and I’ve probably thought about that phrase more than any other thing a person has said this year. The line could be interpreted as a call to action, but on “Crushed Glass,” Gibbs doesn’t seem to be too bothered, rapping with the same skill and dexterity he always has without rushing a word. He fills the track with words— on his acquittal in a sexual assault case, on the life he wants to give his daughter, on cyclical violence, on the President— but almost more important than what those words are is the way he says them, the way they seem to spill out of his mouth, entirely on his own time. The future is here for Freddie Gibbs, but he doesn’t have to give himself up to it.

34. Vulfpeck - Baby I Don’t Know Oh Oh (feat. Charles Jones)/Running Away (feat. Joey Dosik, David T. Walker, and James Gadson):

Vulfpeck is the world’s greatest working soul backing band made up primarily of white Jewish men who went to school in the Midwest and I don’t want any of you to ever forget it.

33. Selena Gomez - Bad Liar:

“Bad Liar” flopped as a pop single for largely the same reasons it works as a song— it commits, fully and deeply, to an aesthetic of jittery dread and paranoia. Uncertainty informs every aspect of “Bad Liar,” from that too-obvious “Psycho Killer” sample and the off-kilter handclaps that open the song to Gomez’ vocal performance, all staccato phrases and tightly limited vocal range.

32. Sheer Mag - Expect the Bayonet:

As a leftist who honestly can’t stand the pompous, overly-academic, and antiquated way certain leftists phrase their talking points, Sheer Mag (among other things) gave me hope about the left this year— they make violent overthrow of the oppressive power structures of capital and empire sound fun! Even if you’re not a revolutionary, you can still appreciate some tightly performed power pop.

31. MUNA - I Know A Place:

This is technically from the last bit of 2016, but it’s on a 2017 album and also time is made up— but anyways this is one of the most beautiful and humanist pop songs I’ve ever heard thanks

#best of 2017 #music

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thecelestialjukebox · 6 years

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Best of 2017: 50-41

50. LCD Soundsystem - call the police:

This is about a minute too long, and I don’t really think we needed James Murphy’s politics hot takes, but LCD Soundsystem doing Berlin Bowie pastiche is always a beautiful thing, and age and growing irrelevance has allowed Murphy to actually make the great pop music that he always was one step of irony away from. This is dad rock, sure, but it’s dad rock that’s lost it’s uneasiness at not being cool anymore, which is a glorious look, especially with a groove this insistent.

49. Phoenix - J-Boy:

The rest of Ti Amo was a bit too insubstantial for my taste (which, for a Phoenix album, is saying a lot— I have a very high tolerance for flighty French synth-rock), but lead single “J-Boy” is an instant classic, from its synth-and-drums disco beat and the little, perfectly-mechanical guitar fills to the weirdo sci fi story that Thomas Mars is telling. Nothing here really makes sense, but it’s beautiful.

48. Freddie Gibbs - 20 Karat Jesus:

A good beat switch is a magical thing, instantly elevating a song and lending it much needed structure. The switch on “20 Karat Jesus” is— pardon the pun— god-tier, perfectly splitting the drudgery documented on the song’s first half and the gleeful freedom of the second. It helps that Gibbs is one of the best pure rappers in the game, sounding perfectly at ease even as he switches up flows and drops into spoken interludes.

47. SZA - Love Galore (feat. Travis $cott):

There’s a lot to love about “Love Galore” but maybe the best part is Travis $cott doing backing vocals, the perfect ridiculous counterpoint to SZA’s epic kiss-offs.

46. Julien Baker - Funeral Pyre:

Fire is so often used as a handy symbol for passion that it’s easy to forget the ugliness of the burn and the materials required for ignition— it gets me every time when Julien Baker cries out “when you drink gasoline.”

45.Ty Dolla $ign, YG - Ex (feat. YG):

The purest and most joyful spite you’ll find on any song this year.

44. Run The Jewels & Danny Brown - Hey Kids (Bumaye):

Like any good RTJ song, this makes me feel like I could single handedly overthrow an oppressive government.

43. Björk, Arca - Blissing Me:

As a music nerd in love with another music nerd, I’m biased but this is the best love song of all time and that’s indisputable fact. (also it’s definitely channeling “Venus as a Boy,” my favorite Björk song, a bit)

42. Jens Lekman - What's That Perfume That You Wear?:

The most wistful, specific, danceable, and weird piece of pop I heard this year.

41. Vic Mensa - Say I Didn't:

One of the qualities that music critics (and really all aesthetic critics, from film to sports) value, perhaps to the point of fetish, is effortlessness. We want our artistic geniuses to float through their realms, untouched and unburdened by mortal friction— they can talk about their struggles, but in the moment of performance they must move with grace. On “Say I Didn’t,” Vic Mensa is the opposite of effortless— you can hear every mental calculation, every bit of pressure applied in each syllable of his sprawling verses. He doesn’t glide on the beat so much as carve out space for his words, forcing you to pay attention to his reflections on family life and personal success— all the more satisfying for the work evident on “Say I Didn’t.”

#best of 2017 #music

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thecelestialjukebox · 6 years

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Best of 2017: 60-51

60. Young Thug, Quavo - You Said (feat. Quavo):

God, there’s no reason for “You Said,” a song that’s exclusively about the sex that Young Thug and Quavo are having, to be seven minutes long. I’m not even sure that this works in any structural sense— Thugger seems to be just trying to fill time, and Quavo was literally dropped into the midsection of the song a week after it came out. But the melodies here, from Thugger’s medicated croak and Quavo’s metallic voice, are beautiful in some bizarre way, in how they fill up the space of the track, leaving no tonal ground uncovered.

59. Demi Lovato - Hitchhiker:

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, but if I did, “classic blues-pop song by Demi Lovato” would be, like, number one on my list of them.

58. Sheer Mag - (Say Goodbye To) Sophie Scholl:

Sheer Mag really hit both of the extraordinarily niche market of “WWII nonviolent resistance history nerds” and “power pop geeks” with one song and that’s admirable.

57. Miya Folick - Trouble Adjusting:

Over the course of her relatively short career so far, Miya Folick has taken on a number of stylistic guises: the surf pop of “Pet Body,” the Florence + The Machine-esque balladry of “God is A Woman,” and the spare, folky meditations of “Talking With Strangers.” “Trouble Adjusting” is yet another shift, but perhaps that’s to be expected when the song itself is about indecision and confusion, all channeled through a vocal performance that moves from whisper to the upper register of Folick’s voice to outright screaming. It’s high drama over dynamic, grungy rock.

56. Big K.R.I.T. - Bury Me In Gold / Big K.R.I.T:

The “K.R.I.T” in Big K.R.I.T’s name stands for “King Remembered In Time,” which is super unwieldy and pretentious. Yet his performance on these two tracks, the first and last from his magnificent double album 4eva is a Mighty Long Time, demonstrates why that’s name is fitting. K.R.I.T raps like he’s beholden to no one else, taking his time and talking through his boasts and ideas with a confidence. He can bring the fireworks, sure — witness the back half of “Big K.R.I.T” — but he doesn’t need to prove anything. Instead, he can just wait, luxuriating over his rich, Southern-tinged beats with all the grace of a king.

55. Kehlani - Undercover:

“Undercover” is this year’s winner of the “Super Bass” sweepstakes (last year’s winner: “Super Love”) and honestly? Kehlani is a more-than-worthy capturer of that crown. Extra points for salvaging a nice hook from a mediocre Akon song.

54. Kelela - Onanon:

Prechorus of the year, tbh!!!!

53. Calvin Harris, Young Thug, Pharrell Williams, Ariana Grande - Heatstroke:

Calvin Harris decided he wanted to make disco this year and then he did and honestly that’s the kind of determination I want to see in a creative figure. Unfortunately, Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 revealed that he only knew how to make, like, three disco songs total. Its singles were a lot of fun, though— any song that features both Young Thug’s best James Brown impression and Pharrell and Ariana Grande competing to scrape the upper ends of their registers is weird enough to be worth your time, and “Heatstroke” mostly makes it work.

52. Dazey and the Scouts - Sad Boys:

The Year Is 2017 And The Best Power Ballad Of The Year Is About Being Disillusioned With Sad Boys God Bless

51. Sidney Gish - It's Afternoon, I'm Feeling Sick / Buckets of Fun:

Sidney Gish is the songwriter that consistently gave me the most joy in her writing this year— the angsty/Banksy/Yangtze rhyme and the Carrie Underwood interpolation on “Afternoon” get me every time, and “Buckets of Fun” perhaps has the highest density of clever lines in any song I’ve heard. Yet Gish is more than just a witty songwriter— her layered compositions make her voice, her guitar work, and an assemblage of nontraditional percussion (I think that’s a ping-pong ball on “Afternoon” into something rich and layered, and her work here also captures the particular loneliness of suburban late teendom in a way that feels deeply real (not, of course, that I know anything about that).

#music #best of 2017

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thecelestialjukebox · 6 years

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Best of 2017: 70-61

70. The Regrettes - Til Tomorrow:

The whole thing around The Regrettes is that they’re literally high schoolers (I think literally every article about them that I could find refers to them as a teen band, and that just feels weird), which is cool but ultimately irrelevant to the fact that “Til Tomorrow” is a really strong, charming piece of garage punk, filled to the brim with little hooks embedded in every bit of the instrumental and the vocals.

69. Future - Draco:

Within 15 seconds, Future already says he has a “pimp degree” here, and the tone for “Draco” is set. While Future’s recent work has trended towards the dour (especially on 2016’s Evol), “Draco” is ridiculous and fully aware of its ridiculousness. Themed loosely around sports, Future’s verses here dance over the descending synth loops that make up “Draco”’s beat. It almost doesn’t matter what he’s saying, exactly— he just sounds like he’s having fun— which is a much better look than “Low Life.”

68. The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die - For Robin:

I’ve thought a lot about death this year. Not, like, my own death, or even the death of anyone in particular, but about how we think about death as a culture, how we mourn and especially how we construe mourning as an inherently public act. When I heard “For Robin” I felt as if someone had been reading my mind— the way this song interweaves and juxtaposes personal and public grief is profound.

67. Car Seat Headrest - War Is Coming (If You Want It):

For a guy who released a total of one new song this year, Car Seat Headrest has had a good 2017. That’s mostly because that one song is as good as “War is Coming,” a piece of paranoia pop that’s the first Car Seat Headrest that you can actually dance to.

66. (Sandy) Alex G - Bobby:

The fiddle on “Bobby” might be my favorite individual instrument part of the whole year. The song around it is pretty damn good as well, a goth country ballad that captures a particular cocktail of longing and guilt beautifully.

65. Steve Lacy - Dark Red:

There’s a haunting undercurrent that runs through “Dark Red,” hidden in the pauses and open spaces that Steve Lacy hones in on here. Until the song’s outro, which brings in some backing vocals and synths, the negative space is almost suffocating, bringing you face to face with Lacy’s paranoia.

64. Migos - Stir Fry:

Migos over a classic Neptunes beat, all clanging percussion and immaculately chosen synths, is an inherent anachronism, but the fusion of early 2000s production and peak 2010s trap idioms here creates some of the most fun pop rap of the year.

63. Mount Eerie - Ravens:

I’m finally able to listen to A Crow Looked at Me without crying, but “Ravens” is still an invoker of sadness in a profound way, in how it melds the specificity of real dates and moments and the grand webs of narrative we tell ourselves to cope with grief.

62. Perfume Genius, Weyes Blood - Sides:

“Sides” sounds unearthly, a crystal palace of a song that envelops you in its stately disregard of nature. When I first heard the song— and really, when I heard most of No Shape, the album it comes from— I thought it was too fussy, too inhuman for me to really connect to it. But the trick that “Sides” plays is in how it uses that initial iciness to make its melt, executed in the last few minutes of the song by featured performer Weyes Blood, all the more powerful.

61. Hurray For The Riff Raff - Pa'lante:

“Pa’lante” is the song on this list that sounds most like the climax to a musical (and despite my overall indifference to musical theater, this is a compliment— you have to appreciate a well executed big damn song.) And in modelling itself on a musical number, “Pa’lante” copies one important thing— restraint. Lead singer and songwriter Alynda Lee Segarra sing-talks her way through the song’s first three minutes, emoting but somehow holding something back as she sings of the systematic and personal dehumanization of colonized and subjugated peoples, just so the song’s climax hits even harder. In the last two minutes of the song, she turns her performance into an impassioned cry for progress, using the song’s title, which is Spanish for “Onwards,” as a mantrant that she ties Puerto Rican and personal history around in one of the most captivating moments in all of 2017’s music.

#best of 2017 #music

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thecelestialjukebox · 6 years

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Best of 2017: 80-71

80. BROCKHAMPTON - BOOGIE:

I spent 6 months of 2017 unaware of BROCKHAMPTON’s existence, 5 months procrastinating listening to Saturation, and 1 month loving “BOOGIE” for the anarchic, beautiful shard of party rap it gets to be.

79. Alvvays - Not My Baby:

Points for:

the guitars on this, which jangle perfectly

the horns at the bridge, which are a wonderful bit of baroque pop addition

the line “Used to make noise, now, I much prefer silence,” which captures something profound about being able to be alone

Points against: Is Molly Rankin doing a faux-British accent?

78. illuminati hotties - (You're Better) Than Ever:

This is one of those songs that’s deceptively complex— underneath what seems to be a fairly standard bit of pop punk, “(You're Better) Than Ever” is full of little musical details that blend together endlessly, from the burst of static that starts the song off to the 60s surf organ that rises steadily throughout the song.

77. Vulfpeck - Business Casual (feat. Coco O.):

This is a love song that’s written like a business-motivational seminar and climaxes in a clarinet solo that they just lifted from another Vulfpeck song because Vulfpeck are entirely a goofy enterprise and I love them.

76. Lorde, Chromeo - Green Light - Remix:

God, can you imagine the universe where Melodrama is produced by Chromeo and not Jack Antonoff?

75. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Bosses Hang:

When the revolution comes this is the national anthem yes all fifteen minutes of it

74. Harry Styles - Sign of the Times:

This is the exact kind of classic rock campy shit that no one does anymore and if I have to get it from noted British film actor Harry Edward Styles then so be it.

73. Fever Ray - To The Moon And Back:

This starts with two full minutes of glorious synth fuckery, all loops and arpeggios building over each other, before Karin Dreijer even gets to sing a word. It’s a long build that’s worth the wait— Dreijer, who lent her strange Scandinavian voice to the Knife’s beautifully anarchist electropop (R.I.P), sings here of queer sex with a pure glee that makes a line like the one that serves as the climax to this song into something truly incredible (it’s really worth your own surprise when you listen to it).

72. Half Waif - Severed Logic:

The synths at the beginning of “Severed Logic” have always sounded like some sort of mournful march, and even as the mix builds into something funkier and more jittery, that original feeling still is a fitting companion to Nandi Rose Plunkett’s fears and paranoias.

71. Kamaiyah - Successful:

In the two years since “How Does It Feel,” her breakthrough hit, Kamaiyah has perfected the art of the 90s rap pastiche, taking the best bits of that decade’s production styles and unabashed glam but never compromising her own voice, the way she luxuriates in her own come-up. “Successful” is the best example of this skill, directly calling back to “How Does It Feel” but still advancing her sound.

#best of 2017 #music

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thecelestialjukebox · 6 years

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Best of 2017: 90-81

90. Lil Uzi Vert & Pharrell - Neon Guts:

Lil Uzi Vert and Pharrell sound so unbothered on “Neon Guts” that they’re almost taunting you, daring you to get on their level of insouciance. They’re helped along by Pharrell’s beat, which sounds vaguely like a remix of the Wii Shop theme, but most of all their rhymes are just fun, boasting invocations of Hawaiian vacations, Elon Musk, and Chico Debarge.

89. The xx - Replica:

The xx were perhaps not always destined to make tasteful adult contemporary pop, but fortunately they’ve aged into that genre gracefully. “Replica” bears few of the stylistic trademarks of the band’s first two albums— the mix is much fuller, for one thing— but Romy Croft and Oliver Sim still capture that feeling of beautiful loneliness they codified on their debut album above the churning guitars of the beat.

88. Stormzy - Velvet / Jenny Francis - Interlude:

The actual song of “Velvet,” the part with verses and choruses and a big damn choir part, is very good— it’s perhaps the only big sentimental rap power ballad I can stand. Yet the fun part is after all that bombast, when Stormzy gets to just riff around over the electric piano, expressing surprise at his own singing abilities as he serenades his own song away.

87. VeilHymn - Hymn:

I don’t care that this was apparently made for a completely bizarre marketing campaign for Mailchimp, it’s smooth as hell regardless.

86. MGMT - Little Dark Age:

REAL GOTH HOURS WHO UP

85. Open Mike Eagle, Sammus - Hymnal:

“Hymnal” moves with a dreamlike grace— it’s a three minute moment where you can just let the clouds envelop you and be dazzled by the endlessly inventive rhymes that Open Mike Eagle and Sammus release.

84. Big Thief - Capacity / Mythological Beauty:

Big Thief makes music for witches in the exurbs, warm and friendly stuff with mysticism deep in its veins. These two have slightly different moods, with “Capacity” bearing some raw and elemental disorder in its clatter of guitars and the more conventionally structured “Mythological Beauty” feeling like a chapter in some great song cycle, its guitar arpeggios reaching back and forth through time.

83. Angel Olsen - Special:

“Special” sounds like it’s rising out of the rubble of a grand and derelict mansion, putting itself together second by second. The guitar part— by far the best thing here, even considering Olsen’s haunting, desperate vocal performance— is the nervous system of this rebuilding body of a song, a constantly moving, erratic thing that still holds everything together, flaring up into beautiful outbursts of sound.

82. Charli XCX - Lucky:

This is a banger that sounds like it could be on the Arrival soundtrack and that’s actually the thing I want most in the world thanks.

81. Miguel - Caramelo Duro:

At this point in his career, Miguel is essentially a factory that puts out a steady stream of expertly curated sex jams, filled with his soulful voice and guitar playing. This one’s in Spanish!

#best of 2017 #music

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thecelestialjukebox · 6 years

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Best of 2017: 100-91

100. Leon - Winter Melon Valley:

Leon’s Bird World is an album steeped in nostalgia for SNES games and their post-8 bit soundtracks, a time and experience that I know only from other, glancing nostalgias. Yet the album still hits me in some deep and inexplicable way— a song like “Winter Melon Valley” uses those nostalgia tools and aesthetics to cultivate a supremely serene ambiance that works even if you don’t know what’s being referenced.

99. Sorority Noise - No Halo:

“No Halo” is just long enough to have a whole dramatic arc executed in both its music and lyrics and just short enough for none of its emo tropes to wear thin on me. It’s a miracle, honestly (but that fireworks factory of a chorus is worth your time).

98. Dua Lipa - Blow Your Mind (Mwah):

Dua Lipa manages to make a song where the climax of the chorus is “Mwah” — like, the kissing onomatopoeia thing that’s most often associated with older aunts that you see at Pesach — into an imminently compelling piece of pop music purely on the strength of a charismatic vocal performance. The rest is solid B-range work— enough of a groove to rise above the rest of the boring stuff that dominated the charts this year, not quite enough of a groove to live up to the promise of her vocals.

97. Gesu No Kiwami Otome - シアワセ林檎:

Japanese math rock is the fusion genre you didn’t realize you needed in your life. I’m pretty sure Gesu no Kiwami Otome are the genre’s only practitioners, but fortunately their songs are filled with enough jazzy piano fills and shifting drum rhythms to keep your attention on multiple listens.

96. Saba & MfnMelo - How You Live:

“How You Live” is hypnotic— in its psychedelic, retro-tinged beat, in the way that the triplet flows that Chicago rappers Saba and MfnMelo seem to stumble and loop over each other, but most of all in how they show an easy, warm skill with their rhymes. They’re aware of their greatness, even if the rest of the world isn’t.

95. Waxahatchee - No Question:

On “No Question,” Katie Crutchfield sounds like she’s singing from the center of a cyclone of her own design, telling a tale of betrayal and a relationship caught in a vicious cycle with a voice less angry and more disappointed.

94. Dude York - Love Is:

I am a firm believer in true and good love. I recognize that many aren’t, and “Love Is” is a song for them. But I can still appreciate it as a glorious ode to bad love, a song that revels in doomed chemistry and almost makes it sound enticing. Also, it has a sick guitar solo and I am always down for more of those in an increasingly guitar solo averse world.

93. Clean Bandit, Marina and the Diamonds - Disconnect:

This is the first ever forlorn disco track about logging the fuck off and it is honestly the most true to life description of what we all need to do with regards to the internet I’ve heard since Le Tigre.

92. Theo Katzman - Lost and Found:

Theo Katzman makes corny music and I don’t think he’d be mad if I told him that. That’s because corny doesn’t mean bad, really— it just means that “Lost and Found,” like the rest of the 70s rock pastiches on Katzman’s second solo album, Heartbreak Hits, is great in an entirely unsubtle way. “Lost and Found” is a big golden retriever of a song, trying its hardest for you to like it with every electric piano hit and vocal “ooh,” and I can’t help but give in to its obvious charms.

91. Sampha - Reverse Faults:

“Reverse Faults” is a song about things falling apart, and it sounds like it, with layers of synths cascading over an erratic drumbeat as Sampha sings of heartbreak and mistakes. His vocal performance, an unsteady and beautiful thing, is the element that ties all the track together,

#best of 2017 #music

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