Thursday, February 18, 2016

2015


Here's what I posted last year.

My Top 20 Records of 2014:
1. St. Vincent - St. Vincent
2. The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream
3. Tweedy - Sukierae
4. FKA twigs - LP1
5. Damon Albarn - Everyday Robots
6. Sharon Van Etten - Are We There
7. Caribou - Our Love
8. Beck - Morning Phase
9. First Aid Kit - Stay Gold
10. Flying Lotus - You're Dead!
11. Lykke Li - I Never Learn
12. Andy Stott - Faith in Strangers
13. Drowners - Drowners
14. Aphex Twin - Syro
15. Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra - Fuck Off Get Free
16. Cloud Nothings - Here and Nowhere Else
17. Parquet Courts - Sunbathing Animal
18. Ex Hex - Rips
19. Hospitality - Trouble
20. Woods - With Light and With Love
Honourable Mentions (alphabetical order):
The Afghan Whigs - Do to the Beast
Alvvays - Elvis
Ryan Adams - Ryan Adams
The Antlers - Familiars
Clark - Clark
Kevin Drew - Darlings
J Mascis - Tied to a Star
Mogwai - Rave Tapes
Thurston Moore - A New Day
MSMW - Juice
Angel Olsen - Burn Your Fire for No Witness
Phish - Fuego
Real Estate - Atlas
Ty Segall - Manipulator
Spoon - They Want My Soul
A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Sea When Absent
Tennis - Ritual in Repeat
TV on the Radio - Seeds
In retrospect, I stand by most of that, though there were some misses.  The Spoon record, for starters, should have been close to the top ten.  And the Aphex Twin record should have been alot higher.  TSMZ should have been lower - that record creeped up because that band always reminds me of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, which always reminds me of my best friend Matt.  FKA twigs and Caribou should been lower, too.  Those were probably last-minute hipster calls in the endless, pointless search for indie cred.  Real Estate and Tennis could have been higher, I guess?  Maybe TVOTR, too, though I can't remember their record at all.  But who the fuck are A Sunny Day in Glasgow, and why did the one time I listened to their record on the bus home make any impression, much less an honourable mention one?  Then there's Ryan Adams.  And Phish?  I think I was making shit up toward the end.  Sorry.
And, wow, sorry for that whiny-ass post.  My heart wasn't in it.  The core point was solid-ish?  The opposite of the listener-driven "music is the best" view is something like an artist-driven "music is the point."  (Point may not be the right word.)  Both are important, but if the former unites us together in collective appreciation, the latter makes that possible.  What's cooler?  Enjoying something or making something?

Probably making, right?  Yeah, it's making.  Producing content, something that didn't exist before.  Kinda like this blogpost.  

I'm not equating what I'm doing here with the truly magical process of creating music.  I'm just saying, being a struggling blogger is like being a starving artist (without the romantic gauze or, you know, the art) in the sense that it's difficult to find anyone who cares what you have to say.  I've blogged a fair amount.  The personally interesting stuff - my fiction writing and my music writing - rarely gets a click, not even from my team.  The other stuff, specifically the Finnegans Wake blog that OM and I are doing (are we still doing that, btw?), yeah.  The page counts on that one are great.  Or were great, last year when we posted regularly.  Apparently, if you try to read the hardest book ever written in the English language, then get on the internet to sorta complain about it and riff about what little you understood, people will check out your blog.  Like super smart people, who totally understood the book and have read it umpteen times.  True story, who knew?
Well, I'm bogged down somewhere in Book II, but I just listened the new Kamashi Washington record all the way through, again.  What you got, smarties?  Unlike the new Joanna Newsom record, it has nothing to do with FW (as far as I know), so you probably didn't hear it.  Or what about the new Floating Points or some of the amazing stuff Nils Frahm put out last year?  Probably not, huh?  Actually, I just realized that I have no idea what Joyce-heads on Twitter listen to.  No idea.  Maybe their tastes are snobby, or even snobbier than mine.  It's possible that there are some people who are really into Joyce and also really into Pitchfork-reviewed music.
Again, it comes back to Pitchfork.  Not because that website or its writers are so great, but because it/they are so great at identifying interesting music - or, at least, music that's interesting to me.  And they literally cover the field.  OM and I challenged each other to come up with one non-Pitchfork record for our lists.  I don't think that I had a single one that wasn't at least mentioned there.

I know it's late for a Best of Last Year list.  Those few folks who once might've cared and read this in their spare holiday time are long gone.  Then there's everybody else who doesn't care and wouldn't have read this anyway.  Blahblahblah, something about the lady on the porch from Franny and Zooey, blahblahblah, something about how she was actually listening so that's a dumb reference, blahblahblah.  (Obviously, I'm having real difficulties understanding why I should bother to do this.  Maybe it's less Salinger than Bishop Berkeley.  Q: If a blog is written in the forest and no one reads it, does it make an impression?  A: No, it doesn't.  And if it doesn't make an impression, it's hard to say it should exist.)  Anyway, here you go - no editorial blurbs this time.  If you want to talk personally about anything listed or left off, let me know: jafreitag@gmail.com
Top 20 Records of 2015:

1. Joanna Newsom – Divers

2. Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly

    Kamasi Washington - The Epic

3. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell

4. Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit

5. Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear


6. Nils Frahm - Solo

7. Björk - Vulnicura


8. Beach House - Depression Cherry

9. Wilco - Star Wars

10. Chvrches - Every Open Eye

11. Grimes - Art Angels


12. Tame Impala - Currrents

13. Kurt Vile - b’lieve I’m Goin Down

14. Sleater-Kinney - No Cities to Love

15. Deerhunter - Fading Frontier

16. Blur - The Magic Whip

17. Julia Holter - Have You in My Wilderness

18. Panda Bear - Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

19. Floating Points - Elaenia

20. Hop Along - Painted Shut

A Baker's Dozen Honorable Mentions (abc order):


Alabama Shakes - Sound & Color

Arca - Mutant

Battles - La Di Da Di

Beirut - No No No

Andrew Bird - Echolocations: Canyons

Built to Spill - Untethered Moon

The Decemberists - What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World / Florasongs EP

Drake - If You're Reading This It's Too Late

FKA twigs - M3LL155X EP

Lower Dens - Escape from Evil

Laura Marling - Sh
ort Movie

Sidekicks - Runners in the Nerved World

Waxahatchee - Ivy Tripp

If OM reteaches me how to do a postable Spotify playlist, I'll do one for my fave songs of last year.

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