Fourteen of the 30 tracks below are either by a female solo artist, a band with a frontwoman, a male-female duo, someone who doesn’t subscribe to binary gender identifiers, or a Canadian indie-supergroup prominently featuring Neko Case.
I feel like I should apologize one more time for the overwhelming amount of nerdy, folky, melodic indie rock and the distinct lack of Beyonce and Frank Ocean and Kendrick Lamar compared to most best-of-the-decade lists.
If you’re going to make an Important Album in the late 2010s, you’d better wrap it in a personae or extreme vulnerability or some goof-assery,…
A lot of people were talking about building walls in 2017, but the musicians I was listening to that year were all about breaking down barriers: deconstructing genres, combining genres, giving new life to tired genres, imbuing old songs with new meaning and, in some cases, directly questioning those who would divide us.
I don’t think it’s just 20/20 hindsight that gives the impression that the music of 2016 is permeated by a sense of existential dread.
As we speed headlong into the second half of the decade, pleasant surprises abound. Among other things, for me, 2015 is proof that bands I’ve…
We all remember how 2014 was a stand-out year for boundary-pushing country artists and finely crafted, acoustic pop-folk, yeah? OK, I didn’t realize it until…
The question that looms over 2013 is, “Who put out the most Bowie-esque album?” This would seemingly be settled by the fact that David Bowie himself put out an album in 2013 that very deliberately hearkened back to his Berlin Trilogy era, but he wasn’t alone.
Is there an over-arching theme to my picks for albums to highlight from 2012? Nope. Not really. Of course there’s not a through-line other than my own musical taste and the year.
These albums were all legitimately some of the best work these groups had done in years. And though they came close, they never quite surpassed that level of excellence for the rest of the decade.