Music & Films for
Common People
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With seven albums under her sleeve, Marling keeps showing her talent as one of the finest songwriters in the UK, now stripping her sound to the simplest form. Song for our Daughter is a feminist manifesto, a recollection of the ideas of what it means to be a woman, and a deep love letter full of wisdom and advices to her imaginary daughter.
Best tracks: Held Down, Song for our Daughter, Alexandra.
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Including lyrics for the first time in their work, Mordechai is the most accessible (and fun) the band has ever been. Incorporating sounds taken from an eclectic range of sources from all around the world, Khruangbin reaches for getting vibes and atmospheres from every song to give a colorful psychedelic experience for road trips and pool parties.
Best tracks: Time (You and I), Pelota, So we won't Forget.
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Tesfaye finally finds a good balance between the moody vibes that got him the critics praise and the pop scope that threw him to mainstream success, with a pristine manufacture that indulges in 80s retro nostalgia. Although it's an irregular album that has low points (specially when he goes to trap territory), the high points really hit the jackpot.
Best tracks: Blinding Lights, In your Eyes, Save your Tears.
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The Russian avant-garde artist Ekaterina Shilonosova crafts playful compositions that open doors to fantasy worlds that might feel like the quirky madness of a Lewis Carroll tale. Eccentric and colorful, is not suitable for all ears, but those open to the experimentation who are able to follow her lead, will be rewarded with a kaleidoscope experience
Best tracks: Sayonara, Lu Na, Marafon 15.
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Suddenly couldn't be mistaken for anything else than a Caribou album, and yet, there are significative differences between this album and his previous work. For once, the lyrics and vocal work are much more central than ever, and although there are still enough experimentations to keep everything interesting, this is his most structured work to date.
Best tracks: Never Come Back, You and I, Home.
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Græ is a big album, not only because of its lengthy duration of 20 tracks, but becase of the scope of its vision. Sumney is able to experiment in many meaningful ways while keeping is simple and elegant. But it is the sincerity in the lyricism, a confesional and tender songwriting that confronts the ideas of fixed binary identities with the true complexity of being.
Best tracks: Cut Me, Polly, Me in 20 Years.
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After becoming a surprising addition to any good alternative party, Yaeji decided to subvert expectations and rather than going for a explosive house album, the Korean producer decided to go for more complex and nuanced hues in the electronic spectrum. Bouncing from English to Korean at ease, she is as playful and witty as the first time we heard her.
Best tracks: Waking up Down, What we Drew 우리가 그려왔던, When I Grow Up.
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Trying to attach a genre tag to a band like Special Interest is nearly impossible, but if forced, we can hear a clear clash between punk rock and industrial techno. Dissonant and discomforting, The Passion Of comes in a year of turbulence where this feeling of burning everything in search of social and racial justice has resounded louder tan ever.
Best tracks: Street Pulse Beat, All Tomorrow's Carry, A Depravity Such as This...
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One of the most politically engaged voices in alternative rock music, Meg Remy keeps working with the idea of contrasting her feminist and social harsh messages with danceable disco grooves. But among the witty punches to the system, we find moments of empathy to heal the collective trauma that humankind has suffered by its own wrongdoings
Best tracks: 4 American Dollars, Overtime, And Yet it Moves / Y se Mueve.
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Besides TV on the Radio and Bloc Party, black musicians were largely underrepresented in indie rock. Bartees Strange tackles this idea of belonging and having a seat at the table in an electrifying album that is the best that the genre has offered in years. But beyond the post-punk, there are brilliant touches of electronics and rap to bring it to a new decade.
Best tracks: Mustang, Boomer, Stone Meadows.
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Wasn't this supposed to be a techno album for dancing late at clubs? At least that was the expectation after the brutal electronic power of lead single, Melt!, but facing this wide palette of electronic moods threw us out of balance. Yet, Inner Song is all about the healing properties of electronic music; whether it's soft or intense, every song here is cathartic.
Best tracks: Melt!, On, Night
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Although it is reggaeton people the ones who are getting all the media attention, Pimienta is the one that shows the real richness and depth of latin music. Full of afro-colombian rhythms and instrumentations sieved through an indie pop production, Miss Colombia is the perfect album to represent the complexities of modern latinx identities.
Best tracks: Eso que tú Haces, No Pude, Nada (feat. Li Saumet).
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At equal parts rage and pride, the first 2020 album of mystery band Sault is a powerful statement of what it means to be black in contemporary society. An ode of self affirmation and a call for racial justice, Untitled (Black is) really knows how to use the long and rich history of black music to talk about the past, the present, and the future of blackness.
Best tracks: Wildfires, Stop Dem, Hard Life.
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Róisín Machine is the best piece of music that Murphy has ever done on her own and not very far from the most brilliant moments of her time in Moloko. Her presence is commanding and she is not interesting in playing crowd pleasers, but in making sophisticated and complex disco music that stimulates the body and the mind for an ecstatic night of dance.
Best tracks: Incapable, Murphy's Law, Narcissus.
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If Sean Bowie already set himself as one of the most interesting experimental creators in contemporary rock, the scope of Heaven To a Tortured Mind is much bigger and bolder, announcing that we might be in the presence of a big rockstar in line with the great icon that shares his last name. Full of sonic and lyric transgressions, this is a unique experience.
Best tracks: Gospel for a New Century, Kerosene!, Medicine Burn.
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Four albums in, Fleet Foxes are still one of those bands that can't do a bad or even mediocre record. Shore keeps in the same line of his previous work, young men that are wise beyond their age, able to see the beauty and the darkness of the whole world, and finding the most precise and poetic words to present that images to us, but at the same time, sharing the burden of the many existential questions that they found in their explorations. They approach big themes, and paint ambitious landscapes, but there's never a moment when it all sounds overtly intellectual or pretentious; this is such an approachable and easy listening that allows for discovering new rich details in every new listening.
Best tracks: Sunblind, Can I Believe you?, Wading in Waist-High Water.
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It's quite uncertain if it was a mere coincidence or if Bridgers is a true visionary, but her album about the apocalypse couldn't have landed at a more appropriate time that in the middle of a global pandemic. Just like Kirsten Dunst's character in Melancholia, here we are facing a woman who is unable to find happiness in the places she is supposed to, but yet manages to find some inner peace on the realization that the world is coming to its unavoidable ending. From her estranged relationship with her father to the confessions of dreading being on tour around the world, her frankness is remarkable, and her eye for detail and use of symbols hint at an artist that keeps maturing her songwriting.
Best tracks: I Know the End, Kyoto, Garden Song.
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If her debut was a bit flawed, the message of sorority and female empowerment already set her apart from the rest of the pop stars of the end of the 10's. But Future Nostalgia is the album that changed her career entirely. We might have not had an album that is such a complete achievement of pure commercial pop enjoyment since Kylie Minogue's Fever in 2001, where every single song is whole in itself, rather than a few good singles and a lot of mediocre tracks to fill the album, but where every part is cohesive with the rest to form a full round success. Lipa made disco music one of the biggest trends of the year, and her version of it is as feminist and empowering as it was Donna Summer's 45 years ago.
Best tracks: Physical, Don't Start Now, Levitating.
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The death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, two African-American civilians at the hands of police officers who abused their power positions and acted with cruel brutality, sparked a mass movement of protests (both pacifist and violent) that demanded racial justice. RTJ4 is the album that best captures the sentiment of outrage and weariness that black people experienced and that works as a soundtrack to fight repression, injustice and white supremacy. Killer Mike and El-P are mordent in their verses that showcase how are society is unequal at its core, and with powerful beats they show the best way in which music can align with the historial and social changes that the world needs and demands.
Best tracks: Yankee and the Brave (Ep.4), Ooh La la (feat. Greg Nice & DJ Premier), JU$T (feat. Pharrell Williams & Zack de la Rocha).
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It's a paradox that on a year where people wasn't allowed to go to clubs, disco music was such an important trend. It might be Dua Lipa who make it fundamental, Lady Gaga who had massive sales, or Kylie who appropriated the genre to name her album, but it was Jessie Ware who delivered the most sophisticated dance record of the year. If her debut was quite promising indie R&B, her subsequent albums, if not bad efforts, failed to give her a distinctive personality; it's What's Your Pleasure? her reinvention as a dancefloor diva, the one that finally makes her one of the most exciting voices in contemporary music. This is the biggest adrenaline for your quarantine needs of liberation through dancing.
Best tracks: Spotlight, What's your Pleasure, Adore You.
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There's not much that people know about the band that took 2020 by surprise not once, but twice, with two superb albums that are powerful statements of the complexities of blackness: the fear, the sadness and the rage, but also the pride, the joy and the love. It is an album that celebrates the richness of black music through history, mixing afrobeat, R&B, funk, disco, soul and rap, capturing the vibrancy and the passion that many genius black musicians have put in their craft before them. If Rise works very well along with Black Is (released a couple of months before), the individual moments of pride and introspection found in this second album are much more strong and indelible in your mind.
Best tracks: Free, Fearless, Little Boy.
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Throughout their 8 years career, the Haim sisters have been compared to many rock bands fronted by women, from Fleetwood Mac to The Pretenders and Joan Jett. But in their new album, rather than try to shake off the comparisons, they acknowledge the deep impact that female musicians have had in rock, and even expand their palette to include Joni Mitchell's deep folk or Alanis Morisette's enraged 90's rock. But by channeling all this influences into their own stories of love, depression, grief and misogyny within the industry, they reach a new point of maturity and skill both as songwriters and instrument players. It is also an album that demands a full listening, you don't wanna miss the brilliant final act.
Best tracks: Summer Girl, The Steps, Now I'm in it.
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Every single album by Mike Hadreas has been a transformation and a further exploration of the different sides of being queer. He has been the longing twink, the commanding queen and the liberated soul; on Set My Heart on Fire Immediately he might very well be a figure drawn by Tom of Finland. Hadreas explores the masculinity and virility that are found in queerness, with dirty guitars that are his most garage rock side ever seen, and moments were his voice goes very low and deep, but opposed to tender pop moments where he still enjoys his falsettos and are almost radio-friendly, Hadreas is able to explore the flesh and the fluids celebrating the eroticism in the encounter of two male bodies.
Best tracks: Describe, On the Floor, Some Dream.
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There's a jump of quantic dimensions from Porridge Radio's first album to Every Bad. Not only the production is way more professional, but the level of songwriting and the way they burn their angst in powerful riffs is an admirable improvement for a band that is ready for the big leagues of rock. Dana Margolin is not shy about wearing her insecurities and anxieties on her sleeve, but she finds a snarky self-depreciating tone that hints at how the fault might be of social expectations of a young woman, and her theatrical vocal performance is on point to add nuances to an explosive album. Going from garage punk to new wave, Porridge Radio just make us feel alive and breathing with their raw power.
Best songs: Sweet, Give/Take, Lilac.
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At 18, Fiona Apple already showed all the signs of being one of those illuminated teenagers able to capture the full pains and pleasures of growing up with such maturity and elegance that come once in a generation, like Kate Bush before her or Lorde after her. Now, at 42, she goes back to a full introspection of her life, but if previously she was "feeling like a criminal" and detailed the every nights fights with her own brain, now she is able to call the outward world for their responsibility at making her an outcast, from the rejection of schoolmates to the hurt caused by patriarchy, she is fetching the bolt cutters to liberate herself, to pour her pain, her anger, her secret desires, all in a simple canvas where she uses not only her piano and her voice, but her own percussion to tables and boxes containing the remains of her beloved death pets, to subvert any expectations of what it is to made a pop or a rock album. Fetch the Bolt Cutters masters a brilliant lyricism that portrays poignant excerpts from the Apple memoirs, from being empowered by a classmate who claimed she had potential, to being sexually assaulted, but she knows that perfect songwriting is nothing without mastering performance, and she knows when to whisper, when to scream, when to look you in the eyes and deliver a line without blinking. But if she is able to call society for the damaged caused, she has also found a new beautiful way to make music: sorority. An album that is her more feminist to date is rich in finding empathy on other women, so the liberation found is a shared and intersectional act. Apple rose to new levels of artistry perfection, her new record gives her a seat in the pantheon of the best musicians and songwriters in history. Do you remember all those 10 out of 10, even from the harshest music websites? Well, they've never been more deserved.
Best tracks: I Want you to Love me, Heavy Balloon, Cosmonauts, Shameika, Fetch the Bolt Cutters.
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