Best of 2019

It's apparently been seven years since I wrote about music at length, so let's get right into it to make up for lost time.

The way I've listened to music in the past five or six years has obviously been changed by Spotify, as I'm sure your own music habits have been shaped by streaming platforms. I have almost every piece of music at my fingertips. The frequency with which I've listened to music has changed as well, and this greatly altered my listening habits and preferences.

To explain a bit: I'm not the kind of person that wears headphones everywhere and shuts the world out to hear my music. I go to the gym and I listen to whatever they have playing (it's not usually good or happy, but I feel like it adds to the obligatory nature of going to the gym). I drive and I listen to the radio if I don't have a particular album or playlist I want to hear. I clean up around the house and I'm just as likely to put on a podcast while I do it. And, at work, I have at least one headphone in all the time to shut out the noise of the office. It's this latter time that I use most effectively to listen to new music.

My musical discovery process basically comes down to this, and much of it probably isn't that different from yours: I check my Discover Weekly. I check my Release Radar. Anything I really like from there gets saved to my master playlist. Most crucially, I read Pitchfork on a daily basis and pick out albums I think I'd like. Given my listening habits (i.e., doing most of it at work), I cue up a few album reviews and then go listen to those EPs and LPs myself. If I really like them, they get added as playlists so I can come back to them easily in my library.

Since I find reading and writing to be easiest when listening to instrumental music, that's meant a lot of those types of albums making up my library, ranging from modern orchestral arrangements to lo-fi hip-hop to pensive house to glitchy electro. Most generally, I'm a big fan of IDM (intelligent dance music - excuse the pretentious name), because it's just engaging enough that you notice the beats, but it's not so overwhelming that I lose focus of my work. Overall, as long as it's not too dark or too out there, I add it. Then, after all that is done, I'll put on the weekly Fresh Finds playlist, which covers about five different genres, and rip through that in an afternoon.

(I also pay for Hype Machine and listen once or twice a month, but more because I support the owners, and it's compensation for all those years in university I listened for free and really expanded my musical tastes thanks to them.)

So, with all that context in place, I thought I'd organize some of my favourite music into a few fun little categories (Spotify links in the album titles). Below this list, I've compiled some of my favourite individual tracks from 2019 as well.

Full Albums

Biggest Surprise: MUNA -  Saves The World

Oddly enough, the inspiration for my return to blogging. I was lying down on NYE to get some rest, put in my earbuds, and scrolled for an album I knew I'd like. I chose this one, and through the year, it was pretty much my go-to. I used to blog about what was new and different and anti-pop, as much as I thought I knew what all those things were. This music though? It's as pop as it gets, with big hooks and earworms and ballads and a bit of a story threaded through the songs. I wake up a couple times a week with one of these songs' choruses stuck in my head, and unlike Top 40 right now, that's nothing I'm complaining about.

Rock Fun: Sheer Mag - A Distant Call

Just straightforward scuzzy rock jams. This isn't the first (and I hope not the last) album I've loved from Sheer Mag, and they seem to have a knack for writing big songs that take up small bits of time, with snippet-y killer guitar solos to boot. Their lead singer is a powerhouse and she has a great range.

Weird Fun: Club Night - What Life

Here's where I might start to lose some of you. Not 10 seconds into the album, the lead singer's androgynous (I'm still not clear whether it's a man or woman, and honestly, it doesn't matter and I don't care enough to look it up!) but whiny voice comes straight at you. The music overall is juvenile-feeling but fun, and it sits somewhere in that enjoyable area between emo, punk, and indie rock. If you listen and like it, probably keep it to yourself: this isn't one you'll want to put on when you have guests over.

Mood Setter: Kornél Kovács - Stockholm Marathon

...but here's one you would! I had no idea who this guy was when I read the album review, but one listen and I was hooked. This is fantastic house music, and it goes over real easy if you have some friends over for drinks and need something to put on in the background. It's also great driving music, writing music, whatever music - it's versatile, it's effortlessly cool, and it's one of my favourite discoveries this year.

Previously Unknown Pleasure: Cassius - Dreems

Speaking of which, another unknown this year for me was Cassius. If I remember correctly, half of this long-running duo (which got their start in 1988 apparently) sadly passed away around the time this record came out. However, as a legacy, this album is fantastic. It's another splash of colourful house music, in the same vein as Stockholm Marathon, but with the French electronic flair you'd be more used to on a Daft Punk release. Top to bottom, a great album when you need a pick-me-up.

Dark Focus: Earth - Full Upon Her Burning Lips 

Okay, full disclosure: I made these categories up before I started writing these snippets. It's only now that I'm filling them in that I realize the order I thought of them makes for pretty good segues. As such, the opposite of a pick-me-up would be this album here. Again, I don't listen to anything that dark: that means no screaming (usually), no overtly terrorizing themes, and no music that makes me feel too down. However, this album by Earth (another long-running project) has all the dark chords of slow-burn metal, in long-running cuts (two songs clock in at 11 and 12 minutes respectively), but building in a way that makes the music perfect for focusing on a task like paper-writing.

A Little Bit For Everyone: Kindness - Something Like A War

Whoooo, where to start! I get so jazzed when I listen to parts of this album. It's another artist I knew nothing about coming into the year. Think of this album as a compilation centering mostly around indie-pop and R&B. The release as a whole however is such a mish-mash that the weaker cuts are vastly outshined by the standout tracks (one of which is in my list below). My favourite part: Robyn makes a couple unheralded cameos.

Beats On Beats: Clams Casino - Moon Trip Radio

One of the two artists on this list I've been on to for a long time. Clams Casino is a hip-hop producer who I probably owe part of my Masters degree to, what with all the help he gave me writing paper after paper to his lo-fi beats. Moon Trip Radio doesn't have the wall-to-wall quality his other albums do, but it's a solid LP that I like to put on when I'm not sure what else to listen to. The man has some bangers though.

WTF: TNGHT - II

If you're still with me, I'll get ready to lose you again. TNGHT is another duo, and another group I've been on to for years. If I want to put something that'll try to blow the bass out of my car speakers, I put on their earlier work. The drops don't come as hard or as often on this album, but it's got some great beats and unexpected twists and turns, and it shows the creativity these guys have (Kanye's "Blood On The Leaves" is even backed by a throwaway song of theirs).

Second Chances: Local Natives - Violet Street

Here's a group I gave a fair shake to over the decade and they just didn't stick with me for one reason or another. The harmonies and everything were just so precious and I couldn't get behind it. So this new album came along and I was surprised to find that I loved it. The same kinds of harmonies just click for me now, the songs touch on the relatable ("When Am I Gonna Lose You," about the married life) and the not-so-relatable ("Megaton Mile," about nuclear apocalypse), but the mood shifts all work so well and the voices are all so beautiful and just, ugh, I loved this album.

Individual Songs:

So here I have three categories: two special mentions, two gems in otherwise instrumental albums, and all the other songs I liked this year. I left out some of the ones you might've heard on the radio that I liked nevertheless, but we're talking discovery here, so I hope most of these come as new finds to you. My lists below aren't ranked, though "Gone" was easily my favourite song of the year regardless. YouTube links in the song names.

Special Mentions:

Collections of Colonies of Bees ft. Sylvan Esso - "Funeral Singers"
LCD Soundsystem - "Seconds"

For those who may not know, my wife and I lost our beautiful son at 5.5 months old, just before the start of 2019. I've written before about the music I enjoyed with him during his short but amazing life (Young Galaxy's "Pretty Boy" being foremost among them) - these songs are more about life after losing him. "Funeral Singers" is music with a dark theme but a folksy-electro pulse that keeps your head above water. "Seconds" is propulsive but actually does touch on loss ("it took seconds of your time to take his life/it took seconds").

I didn't experience death much before losing our son, and I didn't know how I would react to it and everything around it. I found it's not the things you think that will make you sad or upset - not the hospitals, not the circumstances related to the person's passing, not the little triggers friends and family try to avoid around you. Which is to say, a dark song with "funeral" right in the title was not one of the hardest things for me to get through in 2019. Nor was the monotonous refrain in "Seconds."

Instead, it was the thought that our bright son won't be around anymore; it was the video of him telling my wife, beyond any capability a 3.5 month-old child should have, "I love you"; it was the days home, alone, thinking about how empty the house was without his warmth and presence. No song could ever begin to replace any those things, but I learned that music is more likely to make me feel better than it is to drag me down, no matter the title or the music.

Electronic Category:

Jubilee - "Liquid Liner"
Floating Points - "Bias"

Amidst the easy-listening electronic I heard over the last year, these two hard-charging tracks really stood out. "Bias" is a slow-building gem on an absolute masterpiece of an album (Crush). "Liquid Liner" goes hard from the start and is the kind of song you'd soundtrack an anxiety-ridden late-night chase through a neon city's back alleys to.

Everything Else:

Charli XCX ft. Christine & The Queens - "Gone"
I could not play this song enough this year (much to the chagrin of my wife, who hates it, for reasons unknown). "I feel so unstable/fucking hate these people" is a refrain so venomous, but also the best-delivered line of 2019. The enjoyably bilingual song flows like a Jell-O-filled river through spikes of bass, guided by two fantastic voices, over and through a frantic breakdown near the back end, and punctuated under the surface by Christine's "ne me chercher pas/je ne suis plus la, baby" a clever French mirror to Charli's "don't search me in here/I'm already gone, baby."

Emotional Oranges - "Unless You're Drowning"
What an awful name. What a great song.

Great Grandpa - "Bloom"
The first time it comes on, it feels like you've already heard it before.

The New Pornographers - "Colossus of Rhodes"
The best song you'll hear about break-ins (at least this year).

MUNA - "Number One Fan"
This hook is in my mind forever.

Kindness - "Dreams Fall"
Just an old-fashioned groooove.

Bon Iver - "Naeem"
I'm a sucker any time Justin Vernon bears his fantastic voice and strains it all the way; no AutoTune, no distortion, nothing but his pure, uncut talent.

Sir Babygirl - "Pink Lite"
The best description I heard of this song was that it would've been a smash if it came out in the 90s.