Month: October 2019

10. Angel Olsen – All Mirrors (2019)

By the end of the decade, Angel Olsen had established herself as a brilliant singer who often made music that I didn’t find incredibly interesting. On All Mirrors, she dropped the lo-fi pretensions and enveloped her voice in majestic orchestra and synth arrangements that took the drama in her songs to an entirely different level. This could have easily backfired but ended up being a revelation: Olsen’s songs fit the cinematic, stagey presentation, and her themes about the passing of time and growing up were conveyed not just in the lyrics, but in her growth as a musician. With full confidence in her ability, she unleashed a series of tracks that each showed a different side of her artistry, making this one of the decade’s strongest showcases of pure prodigious talent.

9. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do (2012)

Fiona Apple albums have become rare events, with just two in the last 20 years, and it was easy to see why when listening to The Idler Wheel: this was music that required years of experience in order to live out its stories and craft all the endlessly quotable lyrics. Surrounded by her usual piano with some additional quirky sounds, this was a more spare album than her previous, Extraordinary Machine (which had a controversial squabble over its production), with the focus almost entirely on Apple’s peerless voice and lyrics. Her seeming complete disinterest in contemporary music and trends fueled the unique vibe of The Idler Wheel. These songs seemed to flow out of her organically without desperately trying to fit into a specific style, and it was all in her own singular voice and vocabulary.

8. Tamaryn – The Waves (2010)

It took me almost the entire decade to fully appreciate The Waves, which was released by Tamaryn in 2010 and immediately tossed into the “samey shoegaze revival” bin by most people. Over the years, though, this album separated from all the forgettable pretenders because of the perfect execution of its crystalline goth-rock sound and Tamaryn’s ability as a pop songwriter and singer. On songs like “Love Fade” and “Mild Confusion,” she synthesized almost 30 years worth of shoegaze, goth, and noisy rock while adding layers of emotion and personality with her distinct haunting vocals. The Waves was a masterclass of evocative sound, an album that seemed impossibly vast and fearlessly intimate at the same time.

7. Björk  – Vulnicura (2015)

Vulnicura raises one of the foundational questions of these lists: is an album actually great if you never really want to listen to it? Björk turned the dissolution of a long-term partnership into epic, gorgeous, and miserable drama, bringing back the strings from Homogenic but replacing that album’s forward-thinking pop songs with formless, haunting reflections on the anger and loss she felt. While “Stonemilker” was a throwback to her more majestic, poppy side, the story of the album was how that trademark optimistic sound disappeared, culminating in the 10-minute long crater of despair “Black Lake.” This was not an album to throw on in the car or at a party (unless it was a really weird party), but as an experience and a window into the soul of one of the greatest artists of all time, it was a valuable, completely unique recording that was unrivaled in its emotional weight.

6. Emma Ruth Rundle – Marked For Death (2016)

One of the great stories of the decade was the steady artistic growth of Emma Ruth Rundle, who started her career by quietly churning out a series of intriguing albums as part of The Nocturnes, Marriages, and as a solo artist with records of ambient guitar and folk. On her astonishing breakthrough, Marked For Death, all of the skills she’d been honing felt like they crystalized at once, resulting in spellbinding songs that had as much intensity and feeling as any music I’ve heard. Befitting an artist who dabbled in shoegaze, metal, and folk, the songs on Marked for Death didn’t seem to belong to any genre but Rundles’ own. No one was all that close to this mix of gloomy, atmospheric guitar, impassioned vocals, and songwriting that balanced listenability and experimentation.

5. My Bloody Valentine – m b v (2013)

In maybe the last album release that will ever feel like a communal event, the once-impossible m b v abruptly dropped on My Bloody Valentine’s not-entirely-stable website as the band’s first album in 22 years. In the time since they made the classic Loveless, the band’s trademark shoegaze sound had died out and then come back to life in the form of numerous revival acts (some of whom have already been listed here), so it was hard to know what they could do that would feel vital. I still vividly remember hitting play on this, having no idea what to expect, and feeling the wash of relief and joy when the first notes of “She Found Now” hit and I realized it sounded like classic My Bloody Valentine. The following eight songs told the story of Kevin Shields’ long, probably frustrating journey making the album, with a mix of the classic sound and some songs that took the band somewhere new while staying faithful to what fans love about them. Most of all, it served as a reminder of Shields’ incredible talent: even with a ton of bands trying to sound like My Bloody Valentine, nothing sounded quite like m b v.

4. Emma Ruth Rundle – On Dark Horses (2018)

The giant leap of Marked for Death was always going to make it a tough album for Rundle to follow. But she managed to very narrowly top herself with On Dark Horses, which slightly broadened her sound with a wider range of collaborators and a slightly more traditional rock style that still didn’t really resemble anything else because of her unique musical background. The biggest leap on this album was in its lyrics, which felt more tangible and real than the sometimes vague and biblical words on Marked For Death, and there were even powerful moments of uplift in the gloomy fog created by her guitar. The quiet/loud structures and legitimate rock hooks on songs like “Dead Set Eyes” and “Light Song” gave On Dark Horses a sense of immediacy — Rundle’s songs were easy to get into, and her execution of them made me want to listen to them forever.

3. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (2011)

PJ Harvey’s career is full of left turns, and on Let England Shake they all finally formed a circle. She combined the haunting ghostly sounds of White Chalk, the brutal intensity of Rid of Me, and the atmospheric beauty of Is This Desire? into a cohesive pastoral folk style that still felt new to her, and attached it to an album that explored the lasting effects of war in her native England. Not content to make simplistic “war is bad” screeds, Harvey went several steps deeper, portraying herself as a time traveler or a ghost who described the horrors in vivid detail while connecting them to her own life as someone who knows the history and wishes she could change it. The callbacks in the album’s sound (which included strategic samples of classic music) and the lyrics each told a complete story of how the past is always with us, even if we didn’t experience it ourselves.

2. Colleen Green – I Want to Grow Up (2015)

Already known for her ability to craft catchy pop-punk tunes that didn’t take themselves too seriously, Colleen Green put all of herself into I Want to Grow Up and created a defining tragicomedy for a certain type of stunted millennial. Green’s straight-forward songwriting and blasé attitude added a weird power to her bluntly honest and revealing lyrics, which varied between different shades of devastation in either their relatability, sadness or hilarity. “TV” might have been the most real love song of the decade and “Deeper Than Love” was the album’s emotional centerpiece, a jarring and uncomfortable exploration of Green’s anxieties and fear of intimacy set to an addictive drum machine groove. Folk singers get all the credit for “baring their souls” in their boring music, but most could never approach the authenticity and pathos of this brutally simple, fun rock album. Maybe the highest praise I can give I Want to Grow Up is that by the end of it, I knew exactly who Green was. In its own unambitious way, this was a masterpiece of character-driven comedic storytelling, like A Confederacy of Dunces with riffs.

1. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – The Kid (2017)

Albums like The Kid come along very rarely, and they remind me of why I listen to music: to hear different stories, to experience creative people in their element, and to experience something that sparks my imagination and makes me understand the world a little better. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s detailed modular synth compositions told a story of a life primarily through sound, evoking almost any emotion anyone could want from music. “An Intention” and the title track showed the early innocent moments of childhood when you open your eyes to the world, “In the World but Not of the World” portrayed the young adult feeling of questioning and surprising yourself, and its classic closing track, “To Feel Your Best,” was a profoundly moving conclusion about facing the end with a loved one. In between those major story moments, Smith’s constant playful experimentation on her synths had a magical, unjaded charm, with wonder and youthful spirit flowing out of every quirky sound. Smith’s artistry made me feel like a kid again, like I had just discovered something totally new that amazed me because it was so beyond the scope of my comprehension.

20. Kate Bush – 50 Words for Snow (2011)

Bush’s only release of original material in the decade fittingly felt like it was thought about and labored over forever. Looking to capture the theme of winter, she set her lengthy, piano-based songs to the motif of falling snow, creating stories with narrators that sounded like they had been stuck indoors by themselves for years. On “Wild Man,” she empathized with the misunderstood and hunted Yeti, while song of the decade candidate “Misty” told the story of a doomed tryst with a snowman over 13 spellbinding minutes. In a way that only she could, Bush captured feelings of longing, loneliness, and introversion in possibly her most unusual work yet.

19. Melody’s Echo Chamber – Bon Voyage (2018)

After suffering a serious accident that delayed her follow-up to 2012’s self-titled debut, Melody Prochet released years worth of kooky ideas in 30 rollercoaster minutes on the restlessly strange Bon Voyage. Blending French pop, shoegaze, psychedelia, jazz, and just plain nonsense, this album resembled an abstract musical splatter painting, and there was joy in hearing its manic unhinged creativity and its desire to surprise. Few albums have done more to capture pure imagination in all of its eccentric glory.

18. Throwing Muses –  Purgatory/Paradise (2013)

In a decade partially defined by awful band reunions, Throwing Muses were one of the few bands to get it right. Instead of performing the old hits, Kristin Hersh daringly pushed the band into new — yet still familiar — territory, smashing up their trademark cryptic sound into fragmented songs that led to a unique and disorienting listening experience. Two-part tracks like “Morning Birds” showed up early, then resurfaced later on the album as either a continuation or a reimagining of the first half, providing a weird sense of deja vu. The 32 bruised, beautiful songs on this sprawling album spanned all of the band’s different sounds through the years and served as a reminder of how vital and distinct Hersh’s voice is as both a singer and writer.

17. EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints (2011)

At one point, Erika M. Anderson’s website was called “came outta nowhere,” which described her debut solo album well. Released on an obscure record label, Past Life Martyred Saints practically demanded attention because of its raw, provocative songwriting and abrasive arrangements, which stood out at the time because indie had become very buttoned-up and prim. Her most jolting track, “California,” was a Laurie Anderson/Patti Smith/Nirvana hybrid full of scathing one-liners, while songs like “Marked” and “Butterfly Knife” confronted self-harm in vivid emotional detail. EMA was served well by her complete fearlessness and willingness to go deeper into painful material than almost anyone else.

16. Cold Beat – Chaos By Invitation (2017)

Hannah Lew’s group might have been too subtle for their own good, as their amorphous goth-synth-punk-pop style never quite seemed to catch on with anyone who wrote about music other than me. Chaos By Invitation went in an 80s-inspired synth direction that was hinted at on their previous album, Into the Air, and had a variety of evocative songs that didn’t necessarily present obvious interpretations or moods, instead allowing the listener to react to everything in their own way. Some songs like “Thin Ice” and “Don’t Touch” had a twitchy anxiety and urgency to them, while the shimmering opener “In Motion” was vast and emotive. Every song was an intricate balance of styles with an underlying strangeness that made me keep listening.

15. Priests – The Seduction of Kansas (2019)

 The election of a grifter president created a lot of grifters on the opposite end of the political spectrum who peddled empty outrage and anger targeted at frightened liberals. In that context, The Seduction of Kansas felt like one of the only true punk albums I heard, because it avoided the easy answers and conclusions everyone craved and instead did the more difficult, worthwhile work of looking inward and examining the state of the country as a whole. While still having some aggression to it, this album focused on being thoughtful, and it told cryptic, ambiguous stories through characters that sketched out life in America in accurate detail. The depth of the lyrics was matched with a variety of sounds and textures that were sophisticated while still maintaining the band’s trademark fire. The Seduction of Kansas was everything rock music should be but so rarely is: timely, thought-provoking, and full of creative energy.

14. No Joy – Wait to Pleasure (2013)

Wait to Pleasure wasn’t the sort of album that generates a ton of discussion or deep theorizing about the meaning of the songs, but it was one of the decade’s most compelling and fresh explorations of the shoegaze sound. No Joy excelled by pushing the beauty and noise contrasts in their music to the furthest length possible with extremely loud guitar maelstroms from Laura Lloyd and Jasamine White-Gluz’s vocals, which were pleasant and light to the point of being uncanny. The clash of those two instruments, along with the band’s addictive pop hooks, led to songs that sort of felt like the sun was exploding.

13. Janelle Monae – The Archandroid (2010)

I’ve been let down by Monae in the years since this album, but The Archandroid will always be a reminder of the staggering talent she has. Her story of an android named Cindy Mayweather linked this suite of songs that jumped fearlessly and joyfully across genres and styles, showcasing a dizzying amount of raw ambition and creativity. While most people were praising the conventional pop songs like “Tightrope” on this album, I was geeking out over its weird back half, which had psychedelic rock (“Mushrooms & Roses”), soul with an alien rap interlude (“Neon Valley Street”), Simon and Garfunkel style folk (“57821”) and cosmic electropop (“Wondaland”). Monae’s refusal to put limits on herself was inspiring, but what really made this album great was its spirit of adventure and appeal to fantasy and imagination, traits that are all largely absent in other radio-aspiring pop.

12. SubRosa – For This We Fought the Battle of Ages (2016)

SubRosa did a lot of things I love in music at the most extreme level: their songs were epic in length with massive dynamic shifts, dramatic storytelling, and a collision of beauty and ugliness that was second to none. While they were a metal band and mostly stuck to their own world, I felt like they were almost unintentionally a shoegaze band. For This We Fought the Battle of Ages was their album with the most to say, about surveillance, power dynamics, and how suffering can define people. But it’s that sound, with the thunderous guitars, electric violins, and feminine vocals that made them my choice for the most distinct rock band of the decade.

11. Beach House – Thank Your Lucky Stars (2015)

Beach House were one of the most consistent bands of the decade, almost to their detriment in my mind — it got to a point where it felt like I knew what every song would sound like and I stopped getting excited for their releases. But when I listened to Thank Your Lucky Stars, expecting to be underwhelmed, I was blown away. Released shortly after their other 2015 album, Depression Cherry (which I didn’t even like much, for the aforementioned reasons), this album evolved their sound into something that felt more cloudy and ambiguous instead of sunshine dream pop. Likely influenced by the cover art, listening to it made me feel like I had uncovered something amazing in a dusty old attic, like each song was a window into a different time and maybe a different universe. All of this band’s music is gorgeous, but this is their one album that really resonates with me — the fact that I still have a hard time explaining why is part of its intangible greatness.

30. Free Cake For Every Creature – The Bluest Star (2018)

Katie Bennett’s home recording project started as a low-stakes creative outlet with her friends and ended with The Bluest Star, an album that expanded on the vision of her whispery songs while maintaining the humble charm that made them so endearing to begin with. Backed by mostly jangly guitar, Bennett’s no-frills songs were full of wonderful true-to-life details and created their own universe full of memorable characters and friendships. The Bluest Star might have been the decade’s strongest argument that being genuine and thoughtful is worth more than any money you could spend on production.

29. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Sea When Absent (2014)

A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s innovation in shoegaze was to do a little too much on every single song, resulting in an overcooked mess of noisy guitar parts and overlapping harmonies that nonetheless cohered into something great. Every song on Sea When Absent sounds like it was made out of parts from 15 other songs and then recorded by a group of 40 people who were all in separate rooms. The “too many cooks” style ended up making it unique: the fun with this album was hearing all these disparate parts come together and experiencing the creative sugar rush from everyone jamming as many ideas as possible into each song.

28. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest (2010)

If you can’t tell by now, I wasn’t that interested in the typical acclaimed indie rock bands this decade, since I felt like they all sounded about the same and weren’t particularly interesting. Deerhunter were the one band that always brought something new to the table, though, in part because of Bradford Cox’s odd charisma and his willingness to put artsy emotion into his songs. He and guitarist Lockett Pundt wrote some of their most catchy and thoughtful material on this album, which had a more low-key psychedelic sound that helped spotlight some of the unique stories like “Helicopter.”

27. Lotus Plaza –  Spooky Action at a Distance (2012)

As The Shy One in the Deerhunter boy band, Lockett Pundt was rarely the center of attention, instead ceding the spotlight to outspoken frontman Bradford Cox. Less prolific and flashy, Pundt still provided many Deerhunter highlights, including the epic “Desire Lines,” and on Spooky Action at a Distance he fully branched out on his own with a series of songs in a similar hypnotizing and repetitious mold. There wasn’t a ton to the lyrics or a lot of variety, but Lockett’s low-key guitar heroics and pleasant, nostalgic vocals made this some of the best pure ear candy of the decade.

26. Bat For Lashes – The Bride (2016)

Natasha Khan’s fourth album was almost comically unmarketable, with a misery-inducing premise (a bride-to-be’s fiancé dies on the way to the wedding so she goes on a honeymoon by herself) and slow, piano and synth-driven songs that focused on feminine emotion and drama. It wasn’t easy to get people amped up to listen to songs with titles like “Never Forgive the Angels.” That became part of why I liked the album so much: there was a daringness in Khan’s decision to commit so fully to the story while telling it at her own pace on her own terms, particularly in the internet context that prioritizes attention over everything else. She rewarded patient and thoughtful listeners with an album that contained true artistry and emotion-packed, cathartic songs.

25. Dum Dum Girls – Only in Dreams (2011)

When Only in Dreams came out, I felt like Dum Dum Girls were just a novelty retro act, but over time I came to appreciate its mastermind Kristin Gundred’s (at the time known as Dee Dee) gift for basic, structured songwriting and her ability to put real emotion into a classic pop framework. Written during and after her mother’s death from cancer, Only in Dreams infused its girl-group-meets-Pretenders sound with moving themes of grief and separation from loved ones. The album was strengthened by its rigid structure: the songs felt like they could have existed in any era because of their universal pop language, and when the band finally broke their own rules on the lengthy, towering “Coming Down,” it made for one of the most powerful songs of the decade.

24. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Ears (2016)

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith spent several albums essentially tinkering around on some modular synthesizers she acquired from a neighbor before her breakthrough album, Ears, which finally seemed to focus all of the lessons she’d learned into something resembling pop songs. Utilizing her voice much more and with woodwinds aiding her synth textures, Smith made songs that seemed to form their own natural worlds, full of lush details and quirks. Her wondrous sounds somehow merged the artificial and the organic; songs like “Rare Things Grow” simulated plants growing in a rain forest with water dropping on their leaves while the opener, “First Flight,” evoked looking over a canyon on a windy day. I still don’t understand how she did any of this.

23. Wax Idols – American Tragic (2015)

Hether Fortune was one of the decade’s most underappreciated band leaders, and American Tragic showed her charisma and ability to write dark, meaningful goth rock. Coming off a divorce, she put feelings of love and pain into these songs, turning her real-life experiences into theatrical music drama. Songs like “Lonely You” and “Severely Yours” also showed her sharpening pop instincts; their gorgeous, clear guitar parts and catchy choruses only made Fortune’s lyrics cut deeper.

22. Chelsea Wolfe – Abyss (2015)

Known previously for sullen folk music, Chelsea Wolfe expanded her scale considerably on Abyss, adding scuzzy doom metal guitars that contrasted with her quieter passages. Her songs were so dramatic with the dynamic shifts that they teetered to the edge of being histrionic and over-the-top, but never quite crossed that threshold. Instead, this album’s collision of noise and beauty captured a sense of all-enveloping pitch-black darkness and despair, making it a draining but cathartic listen.

21. Kristin Kontrol – X-Communicate (2016)

After ending Dum Dum Girls, Kristin Gundred took on the persona of Kristin Kontrol and moved into a synth pop style that felt entirely different, but still had the same virtuosic pop songwriting. While continuing to use the structures of verses, choruses, and bridges, X-Communicate had a sense of musical freedom coming off Dum Dum Girls, who were always locked into certain specific aesthetics and moods. Kristin showed a wider range of emotions, showed more of her vocal ability, and showed how joyous it can be to hear an artist reinvent themselves. In my esteemed opinion, no one in this decade was better at twisting well-known pop sounds into something that felt new and personal.