Let's get raised by wolves: the best music of 2017, part one

(The Tris McCall Critics' Poll, inactive this year, is normally a detailed survey about the year in music just passed. Starting with best albums, and best singles, he proceeds to a wide array of categories more specific — best singing, best concert, best liner notes, etc… — and often more potentially snotty, from “song that would drive you craziest on infinite repeat” to “hoary old bastard who ought to spare us all and retire”. He encourages not just votes but explanations, rants, and jokes.

The following is part one of my ballot: simply my favorite albums of 2017. There's a list, followed by paragraphs of description / discussion to cover anyone I didn’t end up discussing later in the ballot.)

Album of the Year

1. Seeming, SOL: a Self-Banishment Ritual

I’ve never had a favorite color: just give me a garish, blazing riot of many colors at once. I’ve never had a favorite food; similar reasoning. I knew what my favorite restaurant was, once, but I’d never lived outside of Iowa, so you can imagine how intense the competition was. I have a favorite TV show, because Doctor Who has done such an immense variety of wonderful things from 1963 to the present that it doesn’t much matter what happens in between the wonderful things; but if you tried to make me pick a favorite TV show with regard to something like “typical level of quality”, I’d be stuck with too many choices again.

I have three favorite movies — alphabetically, Dead Poets Society, Henry Fool, and Lawn Dogs. Favorite book is impossible, though, or even favorite novel / favorite nonfiction book / favorite kids’ picture book. You have to make the categories small enough for me to have a chance. (Favorite Comedy SF Novel: the first 4/3 of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s trilogy. Favorite Comic Novel Set in the Modern U.S.: Jane Smiley’s Moo in a split decision over Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Favorite Comic Novel Set in the Modern Third World: Louis des Berniers’s the War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts. Favorite Earnest Novel Set in the Modern Third World: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Favorite Dystopian Drama: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Favorite Novel About Parenting: Helen DeWitt’s deceptively-titled the Last Samurai. Favorite Novel About Parenting Whose Author Years Later Revealed Herself to Be an Ayn Randist Creep with a Bug Up Her Ass About Political Correctness: Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. Etc.)

In music, dividing questions into “best of a given year” is usually a small enough unit for me to fudge some answers with. “Favorite album ever” is the kind of question I’d expect to find impossible — except in practice, for me, the top two are obvious. They are, for most conversational purposes, *unhelpful* — #1 is Introducing Happiness by Rheostatics (1995), and #2 is Interbabe Concern by the Loud Family (1996) — but that’s not my fault. If you decide to listen to them, I support this decision 100%, and ask only that you listen attentively, and more than once, because there’s a lot going on in each. Introducing Happiness is a friendly, playful, vocal-harmony folk-rock album, full of eloquent storytelling, complexified in dozens of ways by the band’s constant eagerness to work in this super-cool new idea they just thought of. Interbabe Concern is an embittered, depressed-romantic power-pop album, full of excellent poetry and spiteful-but-still-funny wit, complexified in dozens of ways by the band’s constant eagerness to work in this super-cool new idea they just thought of.

After that, there’s way too many possibilities to sort through for my THIRD-favorite album, of course. I don’t quite think Seeming’s new SOL: a Self-Banishment Ritual is among the candidates, but. A month prior to its release, Seeming also released Faceless, containing seven (excellent) songs that didn’t make the main album’s cut (as well as some alternate mixes of the main album’s tracks). Faceless probably contains my song of the year, if its spoken-word-tag-team-plus-synthesizer counts as a song at all: let “Articles of Secession” replace “the Unspeaking” as SOL’s bridge from “Zookeeper” to “Stranger”, and now it at least *might* be my all-time 3rd-favorite album. That’s a slight length-reduction of a 60-minute album, which is pretty long, and I assume they didn’t want to fill up the CD; fair enough. But while “Talk About Bones” is a very good closing track, we’d still only be at 65 minutes if we next let it transition to Faceless’s “Beatlock” and dramatic new closer “20 GOTO 10”, and by that point, yes, I’m pretty sure I’d have three favorite albums ever. We could even squeeze in “Yes Artemis” between “…Bones” and “Beatlock” and be safely under 70, with four perfectly good songs still left for the table-scraps album.

I’ll be discussing SOL — what it does, what it means to me — in response to several questions over the course of this ballot. For now I’ll just say that it follows, musically, in the traditions of Sisters of Mercy, Echo & the Bunnymen, and Depeche Mode. I think those are pretty good traditions; you’ll presumably get more out of SOL if you agree. I do think it’s those traditions’ new masterpiece, though.

2. Soul Enema, Of Clans and Clones and Clowns
3. Sparks, Hippopotamus
4. Deerhoof, Mountain Moves
5. Everything Everything, a Fever Dream
6. Magnetic Fields, 50-Song Memoir
7. Floating Opera, Pop Song on the Elevator Down
8. Randy Newman, Dark Matter
9. Barock Project, Detachment
10. Major Parkinson, Blackbox

The next twenty
Algiers, the Underside of Power
Bodies of Water, Spear in the City
Bubblemath, Edit Peptide
Diablo Swing Orchestra, Pacifisticuffs
Flobots, Noenemies
Guided by Voices, How Do You Spell Heaven?
Jesca Hoop, Memories are Now
Landlady, the World is a Loud Place
Morrissey, Low in High School
Nadah El Shazly, Anwahr
New Pornographers, Whiteout Conditions
Paul Weller, a Kind Revolution
R. Stevie Moore/ Jason Falkner, Make It Be
Robyn Hitchcock, S/T
Roger Waters, Is This the Life That We Really Want?
Sarah Slean, Metaphysics
Schooltree, Heterotopia
Tera Melos, Trash Generator
Universal Totem Orchestra, Mathematical Mother
Xiu Xiu, Forget

Pete Townshend once had Roger Daltrey sing “Hope I die before I get old”. Two decades later, John Linnell wrote and sang “I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die”, and while I was only in high school when I learned of the juxtaposition, I knew at once I was on Linnell’s side. Rock music in general has come over to Linnell’s side as well, but aging well is (1) hard and (2) time-consuming, so the field has taken its time serving as a proper old-age community. I didn’t (in my opinion) hear a great album by someone who’d turned sixty by the end of its release year until 2006 — Hello Young Lovers by Sparks — and it didn’t lead any immediate geriatric rush.

Starting in 2012, though, my records show me genuinely enthusiastic about one album by a sexagenarian each year (Rush, Magma, Ian Anderson, Joe Jackson, David Bowie). The apparent causes varied. Sparks, Jackson, and Bowie all showed up as exemplars of lifelong learning: they’d had time to muck about playing rock, electronic dance, and some of the more adventurous forms of classical musics (as well as some jazz in the latter two cases), putting decades of lessons together. Magma’s Christian Vander, longtime noisy weirdo, seemed to have had time to move *towards* rock, or at any rate towards something resembling melodic song structure (in an album that what was still indexed as a single 35-minute track, true).

Bowie’s Blackstar and Rush’s Clockwork Angels both pulsed, as well, with the ambition to make final grand statements, to pull out all the stops because they weren’t going to be needed again. As for Ian Anderson, with and without Jethro Tull, his albums for me have always fluctuated a lot in quality based on how many good riffs he’d come up with. Still, Homo Erraticus was the experienced work of a man who’d retaught himself to sing after badly damaging his vocal chords in the 1980s; retaught himself to play the flute in the late 1990s after deciding that he’d milked all the value he was going to out of his formally-wrong tongue-flute style; and figured out how to re-embody, as a lyricist, a character he’d invented for a one-off experiment in 1972. *And* the riffs were outstanding.

2017, though, was a bumper crop for the harvesting of tough, fibrous perennials. Sparks composer Ron Mael turned 72; where Hello Young Lovers had been the most adventurous (and I think best) album of his band’s career, Hippopotamus works more as a breezy fusion of every style they’ve ever dabbled in, and I’m not sure I don’t love it even more. Randy Newman turned 74; until this year I’d held him at a distance, finding him too prone to cheap sarcasm or (in his Disney career) cheap sentiment, and it’s very possible that most of the problem was mine. But I don’t think I imagined it completely; Dark Matter opens up with “the Great Debate”, in which Newman explicitly calls himself out for his own straw-man tactics (while still having a jolly Ray Charles/ Dr. John-influenced musical time). He takes care from there, unfurling rich, complex, multilayered sarcasm, and the kinds of old-person sentimentality you earn from watching friends die, and watching children stubbornly insist on becoming individuals.

Roger Waters turned 74 as well. There was no reason to expect to hear from him. After the rest of Pink Floyd couldn’t deal with him any longer, he’d released two solo albums in the 1980s that no one appears to have liked; and a severely crabby 1992 album with choral and gospel influences, Amused to Death, that I thought was pretty great, but which didn’t convince the general public either. That, pretty much, was that (although Wikipedia says he composed a 2005 opera based on translations from French of a libretto about the French Revolution). In 2017, though, huddled up with producer Nigel Godrich, he released the furious Is This the Life We Really Want?, sounding more like Pink Floyd than either he or the remains of the band had since 1980. He’s no more subtle than he ever was — singing about environmental refugees, the victims of drone bombs, the American torture camp at Guantanamo Bay, murdered protesters, a society built on its elite’s infinite greed, and the passivity we’re all susceptible to in letting this happen on our watch — but I’ve aged into the awareness that reality often isn’t subtle either. There’s a lot to be said for someone who’ll show you his platform before announcing “If I had been God, I believe I could have done a better job”.

Robyn Hitchcock turned 64. Robyn Hitchcock is a typically strong set of thoughtful, tuneful guitar-rock, and his suicide-sympathizing “Virginia Woolf” — perhaps the year’s kindest song, even if I have friends I’ve had to lobby the other side of that issue with — would be on my Best Singles list if he’d made it a single.  Paul Weller (turned 59), former leader of first-wave punk band the Jam, meanwhile made an album in territory he hadn’t trodden heavily at all: low-key rock music built from psychedelia and jazz and even abstracted electronic dance music. His album was as gracious and good-hearted as Hitchcock's, and despite being farther from his home base, just as accomplished.

Stephen Merritt of Magnetic Fields turned 52, still plenty suspicious by “My G-G-Generation” standards, and honored it with the accurately-titled 50-Song Memoir. If it lacked the subcultural impact of his earlier 69 Love Songs, I’m inclined to blame the less-funny title, not any reduction in melody or quality. Or perhaps people hoped that he’d write about his own life in some new way, rather than duplicate the emotionally-removed cleverness he observes fictional characters with. I tend towards emotional remove myself, though; to me his choice was as revealing as anyone could possibly have hoped.

Stephen Patrick Morrissey, meanwhile, turned 58, and feels older with his endorsement of the U.K.’s most isolationist, hate-filled politicians. I feel awkward about the fact that it’s exactly him getting into the news as a jackass that reminded me to check out his new album, and even more awkward about the fact that Low in High School is probably my favorite album he’s ever made. True, that comes with a heterodox opinion warning: for me personally, the Smiths were a mediocre band holding back a graceful and intriguing songwriter (the gloriously inventive “How Soon is Now?” aside), so to me it’s a good thing that he’s finally purged all traces of their sound. Bring on the booming drums, the piano, the traces of klezmer! But more to the point, I like the things he’s singing. Some of it’s the kind of songs he’s always done: quirky personality profiles, enthusiastic lust. Some of it’s political, but strangely, that turns out well. He’s as potently anti-authoritarian as Roger Waters: anti-war, urging us to ignore the addicting brainless clamor of the nightly news, and inclined to question soldiers’ motives instead of bowing to their mandatory treatment as heroes. It’s possible he means something different in “Who Will Protect Us from the Police?” than I do — I’ve heard “freedom of speech” mean “freedom to be an asshole and never be criticized” from a few too many people apparently aligned with him — but it’s also possible he means what I would, and the question is important. As for when he assures the people of Israel “I can’t answer for what your armies do/ they are not you”, Waters might consider his argument facile. But it’s a discussion worth having, and one to which pop music rarely lends its verses.

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The music of 2017 resolved another tension for me that I’d first noticed in 2012, when my annual Best Albums lists started to fill up with progressive rock acts, namely “How do I explain my fondness for a genre built on ‘progress’ that still worships at the shrine of albums made before I was born?” I can thank Soul Enema and Barock Project for my new clarity. Soul Enema, despite the awful band name, sound like a goofy but talented ABBA tribute act that decided to make a bunch of new Rush and Yes songs for the heck of it. Barock Project (and if you were Obama, wouldn’t *you* want to move to Germany and find the least political new career you could think of?) write gorgeously sculpted power-ballads that just happen to be in oddly fluctuating time signatures, and decorated with dazzling synthesizer displays and drum outbursts. And I realize: Duh. I started listening to this stuff for exactly the same reason other people listen to hair-metal or Electronic Body Music or trap music or jangle-pop: because I think it’s fun and I like to dance to it. If the Democrats who call themselves Progressives could master that shit, I bet they’d win some damn elections.

There were ambitious prog-rock albums in 2017 too, of course. Major Parkinson sound like prog if it had been invented in the mid-1980s as a new brainstorm by Nick Cave and Tom Waits, and their lyricist (the singer Jon Ivar Kollbotn?) is one of the more impressive poets in rock. Bubblemath play skewed, aggressive (though tuneful), turn-on-a-dime guitar and keyboard riffs, and embody rise-and-fall dynamics as they sing cyclical stories about mood swings and about people, or societies, trapped in futile repetitive behavior patterns.

Universal Totem Orchestra play with such an impressive variety of rock and classical tools that I have a terrible inability to remember any of Mathematical Mother after it ends, but then I’m always immersed again the next time I put it on (and it comes with my kids’ endorsement). Schooltree’s non-4/4 arena rock, heavy on keyboards and vocal harmonies, meanwhile frames a complex story involving travel between reality and dreamworlds, and a teenage girl meeting the embodiments of various early-20th-century psychological concepts. There’s a chance that someday I’ll realize the story is brilliant, and I’ll rush around telling everyone. Apologetically, I have to admit that my current fondness for it doesn’t include that awareness yet. It doesn’t need to.

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Best Album leftover notes. Deerhoof and Tera Melos aren’t filed as “progressive”, but they’re definitely rock, and definitely spiky and difficult. Mountain Moves is also joyous, even when it slips into protest mode, and while I can’t honestly nominate Satomi Matsuzaki for Best Singer, her giddy sweetness does as much to transform a band into its best self as any vocalist I can think of. Trash Generator has more of a punk-rock rawness, if you somehow fused punk’s “we’ve barely taken any lessons” ethos with the movie training-montage ethos of “there, we’ve practiced for four and a half minutes so now we’re better than everyone else in the world”.

Everything Everything are the latest great Britpop band to get millions of YouTube views over there — reward for their energy and tunes and inventiveness and charismatic singing and sometimes-intriguing verbal imagery — while taking ages to get U.S. record companies to release their albums. You thought we’d outgrown that? Me too; ha ha ha. New Pornographers are quasi-American (Vancouver, so right continent), and their reliably energetic cascades of pop melody are ones our record companies have figured out how to find fans for. Or at least find a good-sized niche. Although I gotta say, I think the marketing dudes are under-achieving.

Floating Opera and Bodies of Water are chamber-pop bands, both excellent and lovely. The former gets extra credit from me for variety, but also because while I incompletely connect with their earnest lyrics, and I don’t always know what the implied metaphors are supposed to mean, I feel sure that there are very fine people *would* relate, completely, if the exigencies of music distribution gave them a chance. Sarah Slean, meanwhile, makes pretty, empathetic, formerly-mainstream pop as formerly-marketable as anything Sara Bareilles or Vanessa Carlton or Paula Cole ever did. Yes, that’s a compliment. My word processor keeps changing her last name to Clean, and while this annoys me, she’s the most appropriate artist here it could happen to.

Guided by Voices have tended to sloppy pop/rock underachievement — as measured by any given record; the total volume of Robert Pollard’s work teeters dangerous in stacks over the heads of anyone who still buys it in CD form — but this year saw them making a mere two records at their most focused and consistent, the tunes strong and the loopy lyrics edging towards sense with tempting frequency. R. Stevie Moore and Jason Falkner represent two generations of weird isolated popsmiths (the latter best-known for his time in the college-pop psychedelia band Jellyfish), and their collaboration saw them egging each other one nicely towards complicated catchy tunes in simple but deranged arrangements.

Algiers seem to be what you get when you combine industrial music with gospel vocals, and Flobots, my favorite live-instrumentation hip-hop band, made their own use of gospel on their best 2017 songs as well. Which parts of the Bible shall we assume were being referenced? The subversive ones, of course; those were always the coolest.


(Continue to part two)