Best albums of 2019

I am a strong believer in belated music lists. Hindsight! The past year was stressful for me even before COVID-19 broke, and my favorite music was on average noisier and more irritating than usual. I find comfort and excitement in a mischievous sensibility; if music as chaotic and unpleasant as Jpegmafia’s can hold together, maybe there’s hope yet.

1. 100 Gecs, 1000 Gecs

I’m addicted to everything that I see, yeah! Including screamo death growls, Auto-Tuned cackles, comically heavyhanded drops, pop-punk bangers in disguise, secretly tender love confessions, insanely catchy hooks, and flimsy guitar trash. This marvelous album throws every absurd pop trope of the past decade into a kaleidoscopic blender, spitting out a misshapen musical wind-up toy that never stops exploding and recoagulating, falling down a flight of stairs and revealing a new ghastly face with each bounce. Taken as some musical equivalent of shitposting by writers who think irony and sarcasm are the same, it’s a pop mindfuck that computes emotionally, as awkward kids and/or evil spirits of chaos Laura Les and Dylan Brady make their voices big and ugly and demented because that’s how they feel. Anyway, shitposting is its own species of rock & roll.

2. Taylor Swift, Lover

To be straight is for experience to confirm expectations. Taylor Swift has written about the delight of watching fantasies fulfilled (“Today Was a Fairytale”), renewed (“Begin Again”), or constructed (“Wildest Dreams”). Even when putatively rejecting conventional heteromance, she also sneakily reconstructs it by using its same vocabulary (“Speak Now”). Her best songs address not just desire but the stories we tell about desire, the moments when dreams and reality converge. But Lover is the first time she’s written about the delight of watching experience surpass expactations, the moment when fantasies are gleefully, unexpectedly discarded for something better (“I once believed love would be burning red, but it’s golden” is a lyric whose emotional force requires no familiarity with her catalogue). It radiates calm, a long exhaled breath after years of drama. She made a monogamous maturity move her queerest album, and the colorful electronic beats sound so pretty in the afterglow.

3. Lana Del Rey, Norman Fucking Rockwell

A quietly hysterical collection of observed Hollywood singer-songwriter fictions, played on the piano by a glamorous lady of the canyon who has just shooed guests out of her shag-carpeted parlor and drawn her nicotine-stained curtains after watching California tumble into the sea. In the same year hating boomers became mainstream, the year’s most critically acclaimed album was also a tribute to the most boomerific of rock critics. Greil Marcus, of course, whose taste has never before been so exquisitely pandered to, and I think that’s beautiful.

4. Blueface, Dirt Bag

Blueface doesn’t rap off beat, it’s the beat that can’t keep up. Or as Blueface himself puts it: “I’m literally talking in this bitch and it’s still knockin!” Or as Greg Tate puts it in “The Persistence of Vision: Storyboard P”: “At moments of revolution in artistic form, innovation frequently involves discarding flashy displays of technique. The reduction of ostentatious moves in favour of subtler ones is often read as laziness or limited ability (Flyboy 2: 86).”

5. Jpegmafia, All My Heroes Are Cornballs

Jammed up by jerky segues and pauses, constantly shifting to the next random thing in an endless procession of abrasive diversions, this experimental rap clusterbomb fashions a music of dynamic impatience, wrenching ugly harmonic convergence from the splattering of keyboard doodles, industrial crunches, electronic glitches, roaring guitars, death-factory sirens, repressed shrieks, goopy fusion keyboards, smears of electronic color. Jpegmafia’s rhymes compute mainly as yet more barrage, more proper nouns competing for your attention, but there’s a mischievous energy in his voice that adds a crucial smidgen of humanity. If this music seems the product of online information overload, it’s also the sound of working in the gig economy and/or the service industry, where “directed attention fatigue” has become a cautionary buzzword. My headaches feel like “Rap Grow Old & Die x No Child Left Behind”.

6. Otoboke Beaver, Itekoma Hits

Hardcore punk as hardcore comedy. Rage channeled into hyperactivity. Gnarled riffs and howled tantrums played at violent speed. Keening voices letting loose because they can’t hold the noise inside. Tension and release games crammed with sonic jokes. Tempo changes and dynamic jerks that seem tokens of the band’s impatience but in fact work as tension-building devices, with explosive kickback later–or now! Dissonance as byproduct of acceleration. In the playful intricacy of their group shout-singing I hear the Raincoats too. Angry giggles. Boom!

7. Kim Gordon, No Home Record

Lacking the guitars of her former bandmates, she threw a wall of synthesized barbed wire around some of her meanest basslines ever and made something unprecedented, for her and Sonic Youth–electroindustrial, basically, riding a bass rumble so deep it overpowers the music. The spoken pieces here (“Don’t Play It”, “Cookie Butter”) initially recall her willful avant-filler on A Thousand Leaves and NYC Ghosts & Flowers; then you notice how much more brutally these tracks bring the noise.

8. Kankyo Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990

Billed as ambient but sprightlier than the aesthetic that term suggests to an American audience, this two-hour set captures a moment in Japanese music history when the influence of Erik Satie and John Cage intersected with new ideas about architectural acoustics, inspiring a craze for minimalist electronica designed to peacefully fill a space (as in-store music for Muji, say). Lent contemporary relevance by the influx of chill lo-fi hip-hop beats to study to as well as the vaporwave-derived fascinations with banality and nostalgia, it’s considerably more beautiful than those lineages would imply, as tranquil and friendly as a book of nature poems. These pieces abound with cute tunelets, yet derive their spacious charm from nonmelodic elements–bells, pitched percussion, and the recorded outdoors: running water, chattering birds. Unlike most ambient music, they are not self-contained; when played outside, the synthesizers merge with the sounds of the city.

9. Teejayx6, The Swipe Lessons

By styling himself as an expert scammer, Teejayx6 invents a new internet-era edition of gangsta macho: he’s a master criminal, king of the deep web, fluent in cryptocurrency, relying on his wits to stay ahead of the online piracy brigade. Don’t cross him, lest he steal your grandmother’s social security number. Over darkly stylized beats, his chattering, perpetually surprised flow enters a realm of formal delight accessible to only the most playful. When he hits you with the requisite “All my fans, I really wouldn’t even scam you, I was just playing,” he acknowledges the figurative nature of the game.

10. Clairo, Immunity

A queer adolescent musical diary, tracing the highs and lows of a conflicted relationship that ends ambiguously. Rostam’s production lapses into self-parody exactly once, with the harpsichord flourishes on “Impossible”; otherwise the smoky bedroom-pop shimmer is flawless. “Sofia” exists for inclusion on romantic playlists.