Favorite Albums//2020

Let’s not overthink it: bad year, good music. It was tough whittling this down to a top 30 so find my longlist down at the bottom. As for methodology, I enjoy seeing EPs, mixtapes, and albums of varying degrees of artistic ambition and musical skill all jostling together, but, in all honesty, this particular ranking is ultimately arbitrary; on the right day any one of these could jump to number one. I prefer to think of list-making not as an attempt to craft a definitive document cataloging the best of the best, but rather as something more personal, more idiosyncratic. List-making can surprise you. For instance, in the final tally I was happy to find a number of hardcore, black metal, grindcore, powerviolence, and mathgrind, releases alongside what I have been told is referred to in its most technical nomenclature as “blackened brutal technical death metal.” Which is all to say that, at least in part, this list is a testament to the inordinate amount of time I spent listening new heavy music this year alongside a dear friend—all in all a stupendously rewarding endeavor.

Experimental and ambient releases also seem over-indexed here, something I’m a little self-conscious about since I’ve spent the last few years crafting a self-narrative that positions me as a connoisseur of Big Dumb Bitch Pop—but perhaps the need to feel elsewhere and otherwise this year won out in the end (stay tuned for my favorite songs list where BDBP will be much better represented). Between Pandemic/Political Revolt Albums and Not Pandemic/Political Revolt Albums, I couldn’t say that my favorites of the year skewed one way or the other. I can say that my favorites were those that coaxed me into another world, seduced me, and convinced me to stay. To try and see both the forest and the trees simultaneously, my only real ranking criterion was how much they impressed me—not in the sense of some great judge that must be stirred to appreciation, but in the sense of “making a mark or design on (an object) using a stamp or seal.” So here’s a list of the albums that left the deepest impression on me this year, the music that marked me as its own.

Bandcamp embeds with links to support the artists included where possible. For all others, click on the album art for a YouTube link to an album highlight.

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30. Silver ladders – mary lattimore

Of all the ambient releases on this list, Mary Lattimore’s Silver Ladders is perhaps the most insistently quiet, a delicate celebration of something slow and celestial. But that hardly precludes a sense of real drama; after 20 minutes of patient meditation, you’re rewarded with the sound of the sky being ripped asunder like so much torn scrap paper. Also my choice for best album art of the year.

29. EP – JPEG Mafia

After releasing some brilliant if overlong albums and mixtapes over the last few years, tireless provocateur JPEG Mafia spent this year debuting an enigmatic interview show and releasing a handful of delectable one-off singles that strike me as his best work to date. Collected here as an EP, these songs are dazzling, funny, and uninhibited. In particular, “BALD!” demonstrates not just his lyrical prowess (“Hairline proof God needs balance”) but also a blissful production style totally his own (although, maybe I just like the handclaps).

28. true opera – Moor Jewelry

Like almost everything Moor Mother touches, this off-the-cuff side project with producer Mental Jewelry is pure gold. Forgoing their usual power electronics, the two decided to return to their punk roots live in the studio with a set of blistering noise rock gems. Moor Mother’s searing political clarity is once again paired with a sense of poetic grandeur that gleams in so raucous a setting: “In the midnight hour/ I erase these cowards / Reclaim my power / There’s a gun in your mouth, True Opera.”

27. Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? – The Soft Pink Truth

The title for Drew Daniel’s latest release as The Soft Pink Truth is drawn from one of St. Paul’s epistles (Romans 6:1): “What shall we say then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” Paul is trying to thread the needle here, testifying to the infinite expanse of God’s love through Christ while emphasizing that such unconditional grace is hardly a justification for rampant wrong-doing. Paul’s answer to his own rhetorical question is something like “Of course the fuck not!”, but as an album title Daniel’s truncated use of the beguiling phrase knocks a crack in the concept and leaves it an open question. The music itself is ambient for the anxious listener, a sweet slow-burn of gently glitchy house beats with a classical minimalist flair. Each song uses a word from Paul’s structuring question as its title, but taken as a whole the album ebbs and flows on its own terms before blooming into sheer euphoria. If there’s justifiable sin here, Daniel seems preoccupied with the redemption of pleasure. Thank God.

26. DEBUSSY/RAMEAU – Víkingur Ólafsson

Here on this sparkling collection, Víkingur Ólafsson offers a refreshingly tender take on the piano music of Claude Debussy and the baroque composer Jean-Phillipe Rameau. Indeed, tenderness serves as the connecting thread between this music separated by two centuries; it was Rameau’s “delicate and charming tenderness,” in fact, which Debussy so admired and assimilated into his own work. It might be easy for that tenderness to turn maudlin, but Ólafsson’s tactile finesse at the keyboard allows the part-writing to shine through with remarkable clarity and keeps even the most lugubrious passages of the Debussy selections bright and sprightly. It’s Ólafsson’s interpretations of Rameau, however, which are the real marvel—not just tender, but rambunctious, daring, and dark. That this record has sparked an unprecedented amount of attention for a classical release in 2020 is no surprise considering Ólafsson’s adoration for these two titans of the French keyboard literature.

25. dawn – thin

Music this ignorant and tightly wound doesn’t really need much explication—just listen, laugh, and thrash along.

24. file under uk metaplasm – rian treanor

Looking at this list, it seems that I decidedly did not get dancey this year (apologies to Pink) save for this splenetic marvel. Drawing on his experiences making music during his residency with Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes, British producer Rian Treanor takes Chicago footwork and Tanzanian singeli and synthesizes them into a frenetic, rubbery mess. This is music so steeped in its influences that, despite nearing the point of abstraction, it still compels one’s neurons to fire involuntarily which has resulted in a great deal of excellent flailing on my end. I admit that highlighting a white British producer working in African and Black American idioms makes me a little itchy, so let me take a moment to link to some of the incredible producers and musicians Treanor has explicitly cited as influences on his own work: Jlin, Jay Mitta, Sisso, and check out this Resident Advisor feature on singeli. In fact, I can attest that listening to all these producers back to back is actually really fucking great so go do it.

23. the angel you don’t know – amaarae

In the video for “Fancy,” one of the most infectious tracks I’ve heard this year, Amaarae starts out in a bondage suit covered in cowrie shells reminding us in a wispy croon that she likes it when you call her “Zaddy.” This kind of lopsided braggadocio is key to what I love about this delightfully strange debut from the Ghanian-American songsmith and fashionista. After a childhood spent between Atlanta and Accra, the young producer and singer has distilled the sounds of Top 40 US pop and the rumbling beats of contemporary Afropops into a sublime concoction. She’s received a fair amount of scrutiny for her androgynous appearance and for being openly queer, but her writing lingers less in the turbulence of broad battles over identity than in the messy space between people scrambled by their own desires.

22. Chatta – Chepang

WARNING: EXTREME SHREDDING AND HIGH-VELOCITY PUMMELING.
NEPALESE IMMIGRIND MASTERS DELIVER FREE JAZZ-INFUSED MASTERPIECE AS REBUKE TO ETHNO-NATIONALISM. FUCK YOUR COPS AND FUCK YOUR BORDERS.

21. Hair birth – evicshen

When Pauline Oliveros, a founding mother of electronic music, was first working with signal generators in the mid-60s (such music was made in literal laboratories back then), she began experimenting with tones that moved outside the range of human hearing and left traces of combination tones when amplified. “I felt like a witch capturing sounds from a nether realm,” she wrote of her early experiments. The director of the laboratory felt similarly; he accused of her of dabbling in dark arts and disconnected line amplifiers to discourage the unseemly business. She of course out-maneuvered him and continued her experiments for the duration of her two-month tenure. During her down-time, she would ride her bicycle down to the town power-plant where she “would listen for hours to the source of my newly-found powers.” Sound artist Victoria Shen, AKA Evicshen, is a sullen inheritor of Oliveros’ cultist outlook on sound as something both banal and darkly mystical. As a trained synthesist (Shen has previously worked under Jessica Ryan, herself a student of Don Buchla) Shen crafts her richly textured racket from a handful of analog modular synthesizers, straying from the agro sonic assault you might expect of a typical noise album. Instead, these fetid soundscapes draw as much from the mycological as they do from high-minded theories concerning the physics of sound. Music for intellectuals seeking lurid encounters beneath stall doors.

20. impenetrable cerebral fortress – gulch

That part where he goes,

“WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHRRHHHRHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHARAHHHHHRRRHHAHHAHAHAWHHWHAHHHHHAHHHRHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHAHHHWHWHHHAHHHRHHRHAAAAAAAAAARAHHAHHAHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHWWWWHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH,”

I felt that.

19. how i’m feeling now – charli xcx

It was something of a surprise to find that, of all people, it was Charli XCX who made the only honest-to-god “quarantine album” I gave a shit about this year. I’ve been waiting for some time now for her synthetic hyper-pop sound to really gel for me. Her last two full-lengths, though heralded as the new vanguard of Big Dumb Bitch Pop, struck me a bit calculated (also, just not enough hooks). Ironically, it was in isolation that our prophet of the dancefloor was able to bottle her personal craving for connection into her most euphoric album yet.

18. take a chance on rock ‘n’ roll – Couch slut

I am fairly ambivalent on the use of trauma as raw material for art, but Couch Slut’s Meg Osztrosits doesn’t give a single shit what I think or feel. Outrageous and debased without any pretense to political conscience, Take a Chance on Rock ‘n’ Roll is a disturbingly resplendent mosaic of scar tissue detailing the grim postindustrial hellscape in which Osztrosits grew up and the capriciously sadistic men that populate it. Amid the toxic squall of sludgy feedback and Osztrosits menacing howls, I find myself itching for some kind of revenge fantasy to kick in, anything to counterbalance the arbitrary sexual violence that permeates the record—but that would perhaps defeat the purpose of an album that refuses to let the representation of so particular an experience of suffering be recuperated or abstracted away. There is no reckoning here, no redemption. Instead it stands defiantly in its own pain, an amoral testament to the grim fact of survival.

17. G-E-T-O-U-T!! the Ghetto – Standing on the Corner

Since they first started peddling their lo-fi take on Black Arts-era experimentalism, the art collective Standing on the Corner have busied themselves doing bizarro reworks of Billie Holiday and Gill-Scott Heron-style improv. Following a feature on Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs, their latest release, a three-track charity single benefiting Therapy for Black Girls, finds them in a more kinetic mode as they chug along in fuzzed out ecstasy a la The Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” while the voice of a young girl shouts “get out of the ghetto.” On track two, the driving beat dissolves into a gloriously noisy improvisation before picking back up in the final track “Zolo Go” which as far as I can tell is just part one slowed down and stretched out to seven minutes. I’m not gonna lie, the first time I listened to this fifteen-minute single and realized that the dry manic pulse of part one had been exchanged for a deeper richer groove in the final track, I broke out in tears. I may have been incredibly high at the time, but still, it does my heart good to be reminded that experimental music need not be the dry academic affair it’s often accused of being—that it can, in fact, be a thing of affirmation and joy.

16. Teenage Halloween – Teenage Halloween

On their debut full-length, this scrappy cohort of sweet but angry queers from the Jersey shore meld the big-hearted earnestness of Bruce Springsteen with Green Day’s affable militancy. Despite its more sophomoric moments, half the charm here lies in doofy lines about gentrification and privilege shifting into undeniably searing indictments of the social order sung in lead singer/songwriter Luke Hendriks’ honeyed howl. This is trans anarchist powerpop for the precariat; your favorite tasteful indie band could never. Also, fuck the police.

15. Sleeper Vessels – Fawn Limbs

As a metal neophyte, I’ve found myself forgoing my usual self-directed course of study into the history of the genre, its antecedents and microstyles, and have instead let my limbic system guide me to shit that is pure electricity. To that end, Fawn Limbs’ Sleeper Vessels manages to fork over both the immediate gratification of punishing, percussive power as well as the subtler pleasure of formal complexities which unfurl over time. This album could very well have been a 30-minute juggernaut of nonstop ferocity and still turned out excellent, but instead it’s interspersed with anxious glitched-out drum breaks and more mellow jazzy interludes as soothing as a bout of hallucinatory sleep paralysis. Expertly produced to give each instrument enough space to flail about, the result is a vivid feast of viscera that grows more delectable with each successive bite.

14. All thoughts fly – anna von hauswolff

Something about the organ as an instrument—it’s age, it’s size, the sheer sonic scope of the thing—lends itself to feeling music on a different scale. Intentionally designed to inspire awe at the glory of god, the organ simulates not only other instruments but the very sound of celestial grandeur. But organist Anna von Hauswolff takes a decidedly earth-bound approach to the instrument on her first unaccompanied record. All Thoughts Fly was recorded following von Hauswolff’s recent trip to the 16th century sculpture garden “Sacro Bosco,” commissioned by a count grieving his dead wife. The garden features outlandishly oversized statues of oddly-proportioned mythological creatures now overgrown with vegetation. Back home in Sweden, von Hauswolff sat down at the organ bench to render the wilderness of the place. Her playing is all reedy splendor and murky bellows, harnessing even the peculiar mechanical whirring of the organ as air pitches through its pipes. Even at its most splendorous moments, though, the cloud-bursting magic of these songs feels thick with mud, as if, instead of ascending to heaven we have merely emerged from beneath the ground. All Thoughts Fly reminds us that while the organ is a complex contraption it is also breathing thing, a thing that whispers, a thing that shouts. There’s real reverence here, but it seems less so for the glory of god than for the marvelous grotesquerie of the human imagination and the wheezing wonder of sound.

13. Panopticon – dreamcrusher

Apocalyptic rave, pirate radio for the end-times—all the usual clichés seem to fail me in the end. Thank god Dreamcrusher is infinitely more creative than I am. All I’ll say is that surveillance has never sounded this ecstatic.

12. Inlet – Hum

This one was my comfort blanket this year, music that was heavy enough to make me feel held without being crushed. For many, this largely monochrome space rock record might scan as middling shoegaze or overly-tasteful Sabbath-worship robbed of the occult. But the more generous listener might hear a genuine sense of wonder tinged with despair in all these glacial riffs and tales of barren desert-planets. Normally I am loathe to engage with anything so shamelessly cosmic in content, but hey it’s a sentimental pick and a happy surprise at that. Still, listening to this album in my bleaker moments, it felt like I wasn’t fantasizing about astral wonders from the comfort of the ground, but rather in the very center of a great blankness. From beneath that smothering negation, the question bears repeating: “What can we make here / out of nothingness and love?”

11. Suite for Max Brown – Jeff parker

Eschewing virtuosity for sheer groove, Jeff Parker’s new solo album feels less like an experimental jazz record than it does a beat tape in the style Mad Lib or J Dilla. Suite for Max Brown (the album is intended as a tribute to Parker’s mother, featured on the cover) is composed of manic loops and compact melodic gestures crammed between beats that hiccup and purr. Parker downplays the referentiality of sampling in favor of a soothing meditation on the album’s only sung lines, a koan that’s been an odd source of comfort to me this year: “Everyone moves like they’ve some place to go / build a nest and watch the world go by slow/ a wise one told me they were disconsolate / there are no trap doors if you believe in fate.”

10. sun racket – throwing muses

A goldfish named Freddie Mercury about to be flushed, dead coyotes stuffed in a freezer, a glass of milk ordered at McDonalds, Bo Diddley bridge on the verge of collapse—Throwing Muses‘ most recent album reads like a sun-baked detective novel whose protagonist is too strung out to remember the crime in need of solving. If this were 1994, I feel like this album wouldn’t have flown by so unnoticed, but 30 years in and 10 albums deep (and that’s not counting her solo and side projects), Kristin Hersh is perfectly happy to be writing some of the best music of her career to little fanfare. Although, according to her, it was the music that made its own demands: “All it asked of us,” she’s said, “was to commingle two completely disparate sonic vocabularies: one heavy noise, the other delicate music box.” Brevity suits so simple a premise and these ten songs swell with waves of distorted guitar before ebbing into a day-drunk doo-wop warble. As always, at the center is Hersh, bleary-eyed and conspiratorial, proving yet again that it is in fact possible to wring a whole world out of a handful of dessicated guitar riffs and a surrealist’s lyrical sensibility.

9. Lindé – Afel Bocoum

As the nephew of legendary Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure, Afel Bocoum has long been seen as the latest torch-bearer in a line of globally respected musicians hailing from West Africa. His latest out on World Circuit Records—home not only to his uncle’s records, but also The Buena Vista Social Club—has been a superlative reprieve from the horrors this year has lobbed at me. Bocoum’s band features the usual Malian instruments such as the harp-like kora and the one-string goje as well as drums, bass, and Bocoum’s guitar. The record glides between effervescent dance tunes and hard-nosed grooves that would make James Brown smile. Lindé  is most certainly a joyous affair, though not without a few shadows. On “Avion,” Bocoum’s ode to the airplane, he sings, “The plane is fast for sure / but not faster than death.”

8. ho, why is you here? – Flo Milli

I will spare you my diatribe about how this perfect album was robbed of recognition by our so called taste-makers and jump straight to the part where I threaten to cut off all ties unless you go listen to it right the fuck now. Song for song, this is easily the most pleasurable album I listened to this year. Flo Milli’s dexterous flow is the perfect vehicle for her inexhaustible reservoir of ruthless kiss-offs—all of which are accompanied by absolute monster truck hooks courtesy of a coterie of young producers whose shared aesthetic vision is staggering in its unity and execution. This is the level of exacting perfectionism I wish I could demand of all the music I listen to, but perhaps it is Flo Milli alone who can stand the pressure.

7. Temporary music – Asa tone

Temporary Music comes direct from the jungles outside Jakarta where international trio Asa Tone conducted a set of improvisations back in 2018. Melding the intoxicating sounds of Indonesian mallet instruments and analog synthesizers, the music bubbles and bursts at an insistent clip reminiscent of Steve Reich’s compositions for mallets. The only downside here is how tragically brief the record is; at a trim 30 minutes my heart aches to hear the full sessions. But there’s no denying the expert craft of these 10 songs, how the music so fully transports me yet, in the words of the group, “doesn’t seem to come from one specific place, but instead, from everywhere.”

6. skins n slime – oliver coates

Sound of: the wails of a despondent alien creature learning the cello. The cello weeps in sympathy.

5. Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs, Vol. 1-3 – Gillian Welch

I live on a hill in Pittsburgh which is usually lovely save for the days when the sulfurous air pollution from the nearby Coke plant chokes the air. I was walking the dog one such morning, trying not to wheeze too hard through my mask (coke by-product + air-borne plague + sedentary lifestyle wrought by said plague all compounding) when Gillian Welch’s “Chinatown” came on over my headphones: “There’s a poison in the air / The fever’s everywhere / Bad haze that hangs around in Chinatown.” How galling, I thought, that Welch should write so crushingly beautiful a song some 20 years ago which would encapsulate this insufferably bleak moment in time. But really the decision to release this three-volume collection of finely-wrought bluegrass written over a single weekend (!) at the beginning of the millennium was precipitated by a much more personal crisis. In early March of this year, a tornado touched down outside the studio of Welch and her longtime song-writing partner David Rawlings. The wind ripped off the ceiling above the vault containing all their master-tapes (“like a sardine can,” as Welch described it), subjecting their life’s work to a torrent of rain. In the end, Welch and Rawlings were able to rescue everything, but with the storm behind them and a global pandemic out in front, the two decided to release these three records as a testament to their decades of work together—not to mention as a way to pay for repairs to their studio during a time when live music has ceased to be their primary source of income. But even without such a harrowing backstory, Boots No. 2 has served as my personal pandemic album, the soul-sick soundtrack to this wretched plague and the crumbling of the American Empire. Across nearly fifty songs, Welch proves herself our foremost ventriloquist by throwing the voices of a legion of itinerant sinners, some of whom seek Christ’s salvation, some merely the succor of a lost lover’s embrace. On their own, any one of these three records would be a high watermark in a musician’s career. Taken together they sound like a lost Great American Songbook, a document of hard-won wisdom and grace released for a moment in desperate need of such things.

4. Set my heart on fire immediately – Perfume genius

With two unimpeachable records already behind him, Mike Hadreas could have recorded himself pissing in the woods and still released it to universal acclaim. Instead, he just made another perfect record. Much like Michael Stipe, Hadreas paints with a broad palette of strange prefab imagery. Where in the past he’s worked with feathers, gold lamé, and scrambled Judeo-Christian mythology, this time around he seems preoccupied with a kitschy kind of masculine style: grubby undershirts and snakes, broken Greek statuary and switchblades (shout out to his partner Alan who seems to be consistently appearing in shibari bondage in these videos). Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is the second Perfume Genius album produced by Blake Mills (fingers crossed for the hat trick) whose lush, curlicued arrangements are the perfect foil to Hadreas’ tales of unruly desire sung in the pained and halting style of Roy Orbison. It’s a testament to the narrative finesse of an artist at the height of his powers that this record feels both grand and unspeakably intimate, like a story of an embarrassingly messy hookup told by a marble sculpture reclining on a sparkling motorbike (eat your heart out Gaga).

3. Un Canto Por México, Vol. 1 – NATALIA LAFOURCADE

The release of Un Canto Por Mexico, Vol. 1 marks a breathtaking high in Natalia Lafourcade’s transition from pop star to herald of Mexican roots-music. Her debut pop record and her two excellent Musas albums recorded with Los Maricones now seem but warm-ups for what could easily be called her masterpiece. Sprawling and ornate, Lafourcade and her compatriots weave together a splendidly embroidered tapestry of music. The foundation of the sound is built around stalwart soneros Los Cojolites who specialize in Son Jarocho, a regional style whose origins can be found in Lafourcade’s home state of Veracruz. Central to this sound is the harp, a battery of Afro-Carribean percussion, and an ensemble of variously sized jaranas, eight-string guitars that have a prickly-pear sweetness when plucked. But although Veracruz is the central object of adoration, these songs blend together styles from throughout the country: mariachi strings and horns bump elbows with oompah Tejano accordion and the driving pulse of cumbia percussion. As master of ceremonies, Lafourcade sees clearly the connecting threads between these disparate styles, both geographically and across time. Particularly in the three breathless duets, you can hear how she adorns her own modern pop templates in centuries-old traditions that sound fresh and vital without succumbing to the worst impulses such fusions are often prone to. The true star, though, is Lafourcade’s voice, a marvelous instrument she wields with virtuosic charm. An hour may seem long for a roots-music record, but the sheer diversity of style and masterful execution will leave you hungry for volume two.

2. saint cloud – waxahatchee

What can I say, I’m a sucker for a Literary Indie Album despite my protestations to the contrary. This year more than any other I’ve found myself increasingly allergic to indie rock’s pretensions to a kind of artlessness, as if a connection between artist and listener can only be achieved by sacrificing metaphor and ecstasy for a dozen sad bastard guitar songs that drag along at a snail’s pace. But Katie Crutchfield’s sublime new album is blissfully unmoored from whatever trends dominate the minds of our current indie darlings. In fact, she seems unmoored from her own as Saint Cloud finds her far from the project’s sullen bedroom pop beginnings. Now with a full band alongside her ever-ruthless pen, she filters fucked romantic partnerships and her newfound sobriety into a rosary of songs that subtly build on one another before dissipating into an uneasy truce between past and present. A handful of dissenters have claimed this record to be merely a Lucinda Williams covers album; aside from being wholly inaccurate, I also wonder why anyone would be mad about such a thing. Shouldn’t we be so lucky? Luckier still that these eleven songs bloom with a musical simplicity wholly unique to Crutchfield’s poetic vision—a thing so rooted in place and image that I can virtually see Memphis on fire in the light of day, or the lilacs as they drink the water, the lilacs as they die.

1. Another Country – Dreamcrusher

About a year ago, I went to see Dreamcrusher perform out in Wilkinsburg. DIY noise shows had been decidedly “not my scene” since before I left college and even then the venues could boast a modicum of structural integrity and at least one working toilet. No such guarantees this time around, but after a harrowing semester in which I’d clumsily cosplayed as a careerist writer and corporate podcast producer, I was eager for a return to form in which I could have the year burned away in a haze of beautiful noise. It was the dead of winter and the directions I’d received from a stranger online left me fumbling in the dark across two blocks of a neighborhood ravaged by municipal neglect. After circling the abandoned glass factory twice, I realized that the dull thumping sound I heard was in fact coming from the unmarked storage unit across the street (of course). Past a crude tarp door, a Music Dude apologetically asked for the $8 cover which I gladly handed over. “Venue” would be far too generous a description for what I found inside. The cement interior of the place was lit up in a dull green hue by some strategically placed LEDs which I presume were intended to give off a Blade Runner vibe but instead screamed “dilapidated medical tent.” Needless to say it was fucking freezing while I waited for the opening acts to end; halfway through they even brought out a flaming metal barrel for us poor wretches to warm ourselves by.

As the night wore on, more wierdos and a few hipsters filtered in. The Music Dude handed out fliers promoting DJs I had no plans of seeing. Some chatter about a halfpipe some punks had built in Monroeville and yes they did play shows but don’t bring your fucking car or the cops might find the place. After I got back from the bathroom (a closet with a single broken toilet and a sign that made reference to another toilet elsewhere [also not flushable] exclusively for sit-pissing), some very high teenagers with poorly applied eye-liner asked where I’d gotten my Dreamcrusher shirt. “Oh I think they have a Teespring? Yea just online”—they then thanked me with a group hug. Up until then I realized I’d been trying to keep my distance from the whole affair, but the hug left me thoroughly charmed. In my experience, the kind of people who seek out DIY noise shows are often insufferable, elitist clout-chasers. But they can also be loving in their shared devotion to the art—as a lapsed catholic, something I find quite noble. And in a year when I myself had reached a breaking point with literary clout-chasing in a graduate program wholly devoid of anything noble, I was happy to be among the devout once more.

At some point the air became saturated with a rich and spicy incense. In the corner of the room I saw that Dreamcrusher had taken the “stage” (a platform flanked by two alarmingly large speakers for so small a space carved from cement). Head down, dreads swaying, they waved a fistful of incense in the air as what sounded like a crashing airplane in reverse began to fill the room. About 70 people or so had crammed in by now and we all huddled together as the lights cut out and a strobe began flashing. Soon the airplane crash morphed into what could have been an Ann Peebles song, but slower, louder, utterly molten. Somehow it had become sweltering, the lot of us beginning to sweat and sway to the lumbering tune. As the strobe light flashed quicker and quicker, the swaying turned more combative—still far from a mosh, more like a collective writhing in which we shoved and bounced off one another like overeager electrons. Soon the music kicked into overdrive, a shrill wash of industrial noise above a belligerent thud. Dreamcrusher left their post in the corner now armed with a microphone and a flashlight and merged with the crowd as they howled above the din. At one point, the writhing mass deposited me directly in front of them; they grabbed me by the shirt and screamed directly into my face “YOU SEE. NO FUTURE. IN ME,” the strobe punctuating each line.

That was the last show I saw before my time in grad school went off the rails, before the pandemic. It would be a mistake to call it a spiritual experience. It was distinctly religious—ritualized and shared. In the time since, most of it spent cooped up in a crumbling house on a hill in Pittsburgh, I’ve listened to Dreamcrusher to try and simulate that feeling of being sanctified in a blistering river of sound. More than any other record this year, Another Country served as a kind of metaphysical exfoliant, purging the excess of bullshit clogging my mind. I’ve spent the year since that show thinking a lot about where my own devotions lie, be they aesthetic, sexual, political—which of them are chosen and which of them are vestiges of a life lived under duress in a system that cares nothing for me, my friends, my family? I am distinctly not a utopian thinker; I am wary of greener pastures and at whose expense I might claim them. But I am trying to imagine new ways of making my current wilderness, this shared wreckage, a place of as-yet-unimagined possibilities.

“all I know is wildness. wilderness. finds me when I’m not looking, beckons when I call…

get in there.
stay in it…

what brings me to you is by definition rebellion together. our breathing scream, asymmetric sonics breathes back life into what breathes for us, bleeds us for…our soured tongues thirsts for water, & we will not stop seeking our satisfaction until we are no longer thirsty; that would be out of character. mouthfaint aroma, link up in that other place, noisy interiority. there is nothing & even there there is life.”

—from “UNRULY TEMPORALITIES” by S*an D. Henry Smith as featured on Another Country by Dreamcrusher

Longlist
(not ranked after top 30):