Clairo IMMUNITY (2019)

gentle bedroom torch songs, Alewife and Bags standing out with lucidity and delivery like dawn breaking while you're still walking home, resolute, ready for repainting

Purple Mountains PURPLE MOUNTAINS (2019)

David Berman is the B.J. Hunnicutt to Nick Cave's Hawkeye.  Here he drops the olives down into one last martini and says goodbye with grace and swagger.



rest in peace to a real one

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds GHOSTEEN (2019)

like Mount Eerie, you need to be in a rare place to be receptive-- like spiritual limestone, sturdy enough yet porous, permeable. Cave's a poet in undertaker's garments, useful the way a poet is useful. piloting you through a midnight squall, knowing the eddies, reefs, sandbars, shipwrecks, the past with its savage undertow

your soul's an anchor, your faith a sail.

Hatchie KEEPSAKE (2019)

this is what everyone wants Sky Ferreira to actually sound like.  Without A Blush and Stay With Me are astonishments.

The Japanese House GOOD AT FALLING (2019)

Maybe You're the Reason, We Talk all the Time, and Follow My Girl are evocative of the Eighties that we want to live in, not the one that actually happened. akin to the way M83 turns teenage emotions into a storm surge, Amber Bain acts as a clarifying agent, like a seance in the mausoleum where you forget the Oujia board and just hang with the dead. when being goth is truly internalized, it turns into a superpower, an understanding that sees the cemetery gates for what they are. respect chaos, fight entropy. if you're on your feet, keep swinging.

Chris Gethard TAYLOR HAM....(2019)

a New Jersey tribute album with endearing specificity combined with lines so crisp they sound like they're fresh off the typewriter.

Dorm assignments at Notre Dame were supposed to be completely randomized, and somehow in my one wing (out of seven) of Keough, one of the fourteen men's dorms, there were nearly a dozen kids from the same elite high school in New Jersey. at some point, you tip your cap to the wiseguys and get out of their way.



I hope you made it through Christmas without being duped by Dr. Claw in a Santa suit.

PUP MORBID STUFF (2019)

Side A rules and Kids is the kind of stand-out anthem that will keep you going through the mines of Moria

Dogleg REMEMBER ALDERAAN? (2016)

there are younger, better Japandroids out there, hoarse and poor, buy them a round or throw them some bandcamp bones

they made one of the songs of the year ffs

Future Teens BREAKUP SEASON (2019)

fulfilling a super-satisfying, surprisingly fresh and modern, trifecta of emo, pop-punk and Sarah Records-style Anorak pop.

I think Sarah (and K Records, to a lesser extent) has a ton to offer to the younger generation of musicians breaking right now, and I'm sure the most savvy (Phoebe MFing Bridgers) are already siphoning inspiration off them.  Sarah has a ton of stuff on Bandcamp.  I bought most of it back in the day on eMusic, so it is on defunct iPods and probably some storage DVDs somewhere at my parents' house.  I listened to it a lot senior year of college, late night homework sessions surrounded by Christmas lights and knee-deep snow.  When you're a kid you're told not to mess with your scabs, but as an adult you have to rip them open again and again, you have to stay fresh, you need a stinging wind, a wound that won't close.

Elder THE GOLD & SILVER SESSIONS (2019)

doomlords doing the Dead better than the Dead

Orville Peck PONY (2019)

in the year of Old Town Road, this is the essential country album