Mar. 29th, 2020 08:10 pm

2019 in music

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[personal profile] joshua0

Once again, I'm late on putting this one together, but at least it's still Q1 of 2020 (albeit barely...). It feels like 2019 was a very full year, but somehow, it wasn't as full of new musical things as was 2018, with only 17 new albums to last year's 22. There was a lot of generally forgettable stuff this year, but there are quite a few things that ended up in my playlist over and over!

As usual, here's how this works: the rating system is relative and subjective rating system, from one to five stars. A one star album is not, necessarily, bad (unless I say it is...) — think of it, really, as how much I am excited about listening to something, so one star just might mean that I haven't really found a place for it in my regular listening habits. The more stars, the more I think other people will want to listen to it too — or, at least, the more I think other people ought to listen to it, anyway...!

Got it? Okay, well, let's get started — this year, I bought 17 albums, did 2 things of my own, saw 4 live shows, and recommended another additional 26 pieces of "extra credit", and here they all are:

Table of contents.

A return visitor from last year, an end-of-year mix: Don't have time to read through all of this, but want a taste of what I listened to this year? I have assembled for you a CD-ish-length (64-minute) continuous mix with some of the most important tracks that I listened to this year, spanning a variety of genres, feelings, and tones. This year's was a real challenge to put together, but it was very rewarding to do so; I hope you'll enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed assembling it for you!

New albums for 2019.

  • February 19th: Ladytron - Ladytron (⭑⭑⭑; released February 15th).

    Electronica, dark synthwave. Recommend for genre fans.

    It's been a while since Ladytron released something new, and I think this is a good effort for all that time. Musically, it is relatively diverse (at least, within the genre...), and it is short and sweet and to the point, clocking in at just shy of 54 minutes. The rhythmic repetition results in tracks that stick out in my mind, and are extremely danceable; many of these fit naturally in a DJ set designed to get your body moving, but on the other hand, they seem to work equally well at my desk. If I have to make a complaint, which I do, it's that it's been compressed to hell and back, and the percussion -- which I claim is driving the album -- gets lost in the muddle. (You'll hear that a lot from me this year, so get used to it.)

    Deadzone and Figurine are two heavily danceable tracks from Ladytron's self-titled.

    “Tomorrow Is Another Day”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • April 17th: Aesthetic Perfection - Into The Black (⭑⭑⭑⭑; released March 29th).

    Futurepop, rock. Recommend for Aesthetic Perfection fans.

    Over the years, Daniel Graves has gotten a bunch of grief for his project, Aesthetic Perfection, having become more "pop"-ish, and less... Industrial, or EBM, or whatever. The thing is: Daniel Graves never really was what those fans wanted him to be! All along, if you kept your ears open, he has always trended towards a more melodic pop sound (accompanied by bursts of his trademark screaming, of course). If you look at his history of remixes, you'll see that when given the opportunity to enter a remix contest, he enters contests for... Lady Gaga, and the results are amazing (well, amazing, if you like Daniel Graves). So it shouldn't be a surprise when his new album is more pop-heavy, and, well, it is.

    It's a fine album, but the only thing I have against it is that it's just more of the same. Which is what you expect, but all the same, the catchy lick from Supernatural is basically xeroxed from Never Enough (2015), which is hard to let slide. On the other hand, the mix is wonderfully punchy, and that goes a long way in my mind.

    Have a listen to Supernatural, which I love, and Wickedness.

  • February 22nd: Dream Theater - Distance Over Time (⭑; released February 22nd).

    Prog rock. Wait, Dream Theater released an album last year?? and I bought it??? I think it actually was good, but obviously I never listened to it a second time, so it was completely forgettable. Maybe I oughta give it another listen.

  • February 23rd: Deep Energy Orchestra - Playing With Fire (⭑⭑⭑; released October, 2018).

    Indo-jazz; free jazz. Recommend for Jazz People; good desk listening.

    I bought this on recommendation of Dev Purandare to use as preroll music at !!Con West 2019. It was great for that -- and, as it turns out, a bunch of it was great for all-purpose listening, too! Listen to it as you work, or to introduce your conference. As does Dev, I really like Lotus Feet.

  • February 23rd: Vienna Teng - Aims (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑; released September, 2013).

    A variety, including pop, electronica, and ... whatever you call Vienna Teng. Recommended for most people.

    So I'd seen Vienna Teng live in early January, and it seemed like Level Up would be "obviously" the right opening for !!Con West. For bonus points, the album is licensed CC-BY, so I had no problems with letting it go out over the live stream, too. I love a lot about this album, and a lot of it has stuck with me; I think one of my favorite things about Vienna Teng is the variety both of sounds and affects that she brings to her albums. So much of it pops into my head out of nowhere from time to time, and the amazing thing is that it's not just one or two songs, but a good cross-section of the album!

    It's hard to pick one or two favorites, but consider the bookends, Level Up and Goodnight New York, as representative of the album.

    “The Breaking Light”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • February 23rd: The Album Leaf - One Day I'll Be On Time (⭑⭑⭑⭑; released May, 2001).

    Soft, ambient, a little electric but largely acoustic. Recommended for most people.

    Recommended by Lindsey Kuper, also during !!Con West. Also great desk music, and I've found that it also works well in yoga classes. It's hard to say much about it, but I really really like it: it's a soothing mix of guitar and the occasional bleeps and bloops. Representative from this album, I think, is Storyboard.

    “Last Time Here”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • April 19th: TR/ST - The Destroyer, pt. 1 (⭑⭑⭑; released April 19th).

    Gothy massive beats. Recommended for fans.

    It has been years since Robert Alfons released Joyland, and in the mean time, he's been dropping singles here and there. At long last, this year, he announced that he'd release a double-album, spaced over the year. The albums were... fine! Not every track was a massive hit, but they all had his signature sound. I would say that a solid 50% of tracks on this 8-track album were decent, and the rest were largely forgettable.

    It's not a bad hit rate, but it's not "stop the world, you gotta hear this". One of the better tracks is Gone.

  • May 10th: Gareth Emery & Ashley Wallbridge - Kingdom United (⭑⭑; released May 10th).

    Gareth Emery trance. Gareth Emery completionists can get it, everyone else can skip.

    Do you like the Gareth Emery song? (The new one, not the old one. There's only one new one and only one old one, the rest are just copies.) If you do, you might like this album, because it has 14 of the Gareth Emery song, including one of the standard outro Gareth Emery song (my favorite Gareth Emery song). Listen to Lionheart, and if you like it, you can get the album. Or maybe you can still skip the album.

    “Kingdom United”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • July 9th: The Atomica Project - Grayscale (⭑⭑⭑⭑; released December 2007).

    Dark and downtempo and sad, jazzy, trip-hop. If you like that idea, stop and buy it. If not, skip it.

    This album will probably be polarizing. It is challenging because of how dark it is. But all the same, I loved it both musically and content-wise. The sparse sonic landscape and mix of the album matches the emotional tone, and I give a lot of credit to the songwriting. I found this album originally because of the Iris remix of Gravity, which was crossposted to Andrew Sega's soundcloud; the original has a very different tone. If that all sounds appealing to you, have a listen to Gravity. And if it doesn't, well, I don't blame you.

    “All the Loneliness in the World”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • August 23rd: Iris - Six (Deluxe) (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑; released August 23rd).

    Synthpop and darkwave. Listen to it for almost everyone, buy it for fans of the genre.

    I'm going to start by getting this out of the way. The mastering on this album is bad. It's dog shit bad. The whole album is firewalled, and there's so much punchiness in the instrumentation, and the vocals are lost in the mix, and I'm so angry about it. The worst part is that the B-sides on the deluxe version aren't like this at all, so you get an idea that they are capable of making an album that isn't slammed to the limiters! They just decided not to, for no good reason.

    Ok, that's out of the way. If you put that behind us, I love this album. Andrew Sega's sounds and beats are some of his finest, and Reagan Jones's songwriting is on form too (at least, as long as you don't mind that form being "slightly less heavyhanded than VNV Nation"). It's a diverse album in terms of sounds, tempos, feelings, ... it goes from the driving opener of Third Strike, ending up in the lush, warm, green Final Fate. It all feels exactly like what it's supposed to be. I just wish you could hear it in the mix. The fact that it still managed a five-star despite the disastrous mix maybe should tell you a lot about how much I like it, musically.

    Have a listen to Feeder and Final Fate for a taste of the range of Six.

    “Joy Kill”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • October 10th: Above & Beyond - Flow State (⭑⭑⭑; released July 19th).

    Ambient.

    I give Above & Beyond a lot of credit here. For the past while, they've mostly been following trends, and, well... the results have been mediocre. The world wants them to pump out big rewm houws, and they do, and it's ... not their thing. Tri-state was such an emotionally open album, which felt like it was meaningfully "their thing"; over time, it felt like they progressively transitioned to Just Turning The Crank On Some Beats. So although ambient is not necessarily my thing, this album feels like it goes back to their roots in a lot of ways: it sonically experiments with feelings in a way that most of their subsequent stuff simply hasn't done. (And, in addition, I give them a lot of credit for mastering the album with a load of dynamic range!)

    Have a listen to Don't Leave.

    “Don't Leave” also ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • October 10th: TesseracT - Sonder (⭑; released April 2018).

    Prog metal. I bought it hoping to like more prog metal in the way I like Animals as Leaders. I didn't.

  • November 5th: Rudimental - Toast to Our Differences (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑; released September, 2018).

    Pop. Nominally drum & bass, but realistically, much more of a reggae influence. Buy this.

    I really liked this! I originally heard it on an EVA Air flight on the in-flight entertainment, and I was surprised by how much I liked something on the plane. This is a solid album that also has a great mix of tones and feelings to it, all with a great collection of beats and vocals. In my mind, I associate Rudimental with drum & bass, but what I've learned from this is that they're capable of much, much more -- and that when they bring a variety of guest vocalists on the album, you get even more than that still.

    One thing that I love about is that it feels like a cohesive album, rather than just a collection of songs. Bonus points for being well-mastered and punchy-sounding, too. It's hard to extract songs in isolation, but for a taste of the range of the album, maybe compare the massive chorus of Sun Comes Up with the pared-down D&B beats of Do You Remember.

    “Thula Ungakhlai” and “These Days”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • November 19th: TR/ST - The Destroyer, pt. 2 (⭑⭑; released November 1st).

    Most of what I have to say about this is the same as what I have to say about part 1, other than that maybe I think this should have been a single album rather than two albums. The title track, Destroyer, is musically great, extremely punchy, and the music video is fantastic, too; it ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • November 30th: KANGA - Eternal Daughter (⭑⭑⭑; released September 9th).

    Futurepop, EBM, darkwave. Recommended for genre fans.

    Ok, I really like this album, but it's not for everyone. It has moments that are extremely danceable. The beats are huge; Kanga knows what she's going for, and executes to great effect. It's short and to the point, coming in at a 6-track 20-minute EP. What's not to like?

    I mean, other than if you don't like the genre. But I do. Burn will tell you if you like it or not.

  • December 17th: BT - Everything You're Searching For Is On The Other Side Of Fear (⭑; released December 13th).

    Experimental. Tooooo experimental.

  • December 29th: Armin van Buuren - A State of Trance, Year Mix 2019 (⭑⭑; released December 13th).

    Yep, another ASOT yearmix.

    I liked this year's. The intro is increasingly bizarre every year, and this one's made me laugh pretty hard. I listened to this actually a few times! But not more than that, I think.

This year, I didn't do a whole lot of mixing on my own. Here are two things I did in 2019:

  • on the edge: 2019, as heard by Joshua. This year, I did a very different feeling mixtape. 2019 was a rougher year for me than was 2018, it seems, and the songs I chose reflected that. I don't know if this is a thing lots of folks will enjoy, but that's ok. I liked it.
  • Cabin. Over the December break, I decided I finally wanted to try singing again. Without any real knowledge of composition, I took a crack at doing a choral-style cover of a few verses and the chorus of Alexx Reed's Cabin. I don't call it polished at all, but I think it's a different view on something that I know well, anyway.

I also listened to a bunch of music that I didn't end up buying -- for some of these, because I didn't really want a whole album, and for some of them, because there wasn't a whole album to be had (or sometimes, because I forgot). For extra credit, here's a smattering of these things that I wrote down, anyway, sorted roughly by category ... but fair warning, they get weird in a hurry:

Finally, I got to see some live shows last year. Here's my rundown of what I saw:

  • Vienna Teng at Freight & Salvage (January 4th). If you get a chance to see Vienna Teng live, you should totally do it. Her sets are fully request-based; in this set, she ... drew a request for the jazz standard, Autumn Leaves, out of a hat, and then thought for a moment, and played it from memory. Who does that? How? It's amazing.
  • Chicane and 4 Strings at Mezzanine (February 1st). Trance classics! I might be too old for this. Photos and snaps.
  • Kamasi Washington and Herbie Hancock at Greek Theatre, Berkeley (August 23rd). This was an incredible show that I am lucky to have seen. Herbie Hancock is a living legend, and Kamasi Washington is not just an up-and-coming but now-present total star. Oddly, their roles were reversed in this show: Kamasi Washington did his best to present to us the best-in-the-world possible view of "what Jazz is", and Herbie Hancock, following him, completely turned our minds inside out with his premise of what the future of jazz ought to be. Photos, snaps, and videos.
  • Vienna Teng at Freight & Salvage (December 30th). New-years show. Vienna Teng continues to impress, even 6 months pregnant. The schedules just happened to land this year that we got two in a year.
  • Alex Reed at online (three concerts over the course of the year). Alexx's Patreon continues to surprise and delight. He has committed to doing three live-streamed concerts a year, and I'm goign to list them here because they have the same fantastic display of musicianship that I'd expect at any other concert. This year's resulted in a few live albums with some of my favorite versions of a bunch of songs that he's written; unfortunately, they're Patreon-only, rather than available on Bandcamp, so I can't point you to them. Oh, well.

So that was 2019. What did I miss?

(Previously, 2018; 2017; 2016; 2015.)

(Also, this post was automatically formatted by a script that I wrote, and if you want it for yourself, you can get it here.)

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Date: 2020-05-08 08:09 pm (UTC)

brainwane: My smiling face, including a small gold bindi (Default)
From: [personal profile] brainwane
I am downloading the end-of-year mix now and look forward to trying it out. Thank you!
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