The sound and the fury — and the fierceness
Of the thousands of albums released each year, I get to spend quality time with a few hundred. Here are my favorites from 2019:
1. Jamila Woods, “Legacy! Legacy!” (Jagjaguwar): Following up her heavyweight solo debut, the 2016 “Heavn,” the Chicago poet-educator-activist raises the stakes with nothing less than a mini-history of iconoclastic artists who carved their own path in the face of racial oppression and cultural stereotyping. While paying tribute to inspirations ranging from Octavia Butler to Sun Ra, Woods tucks fierceness and empathy inside an expansive soundtrack that blends hip-hop, gospel, jazz and soul, wisdom and protest.
2. Raphael Saadiq, “Jimmy Lee” (Columbia): At age 53, this veteran multi-instrumentalistproducer-songwriter has seemingly done it all as a respected artist and hit-maker. Yet he’s never made an album quite like “Jimmy Lee,” named after a brother who died tragically young. The album’s anguished narratives brim with ghosts of family members Saadiq has lost to drugs, AIDS, violence. The trademark Saadiq musicality merges with harrowing, deeply personal narratives, culminating with the gospel-infused testifying of “Rikers Island.”
3. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, “Ghosteen” (Ghosteen/Bad Seed): Cave has rarely sounded more open, more vulnerable, in a staggering 11-song cycle of grief, mourning, acceptance and redemption. The music floats between shattered, hard-won acceptance of a loved one’s death and wonder. Just when the songs sink into despair, a voice of consolation surfaces. How to live after all seems lost? “I am beside you,” Cave sings. “Look for me.”
4. Michael Kiwanuka, “Kiwanuka” (Interscope): The son of Ugandan immigrants, the singer-guitarist grew up in England feeling like a misfit who never belonged. That search for home, for a sense of solace and purpose, provides the thematic underpinning of his third album. It serves as a response of sorts to its predecessor, the revelatory 2016 album, “Love & Hate.” Once again coproduced by Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, the follow-up is just as expansive, but Kiwanuka’s narrators are now tunneling their way out. Soaked in acid-rock guitar, bubbling funk bass lines and sweeping string and vocal arrangements, the songs pivot on a dare: “Are you really giving up? Are you really gonna stop right now?” Kiwanuka underlines his resolve in the very next song: “I won’t change my name no matter what they call me.”
5. Sharon Van Etten, “Remind Me Tomorrow” (Jagjaguwar): The singer-songwriter took five years off from the album-tour cycle and reemerged with a fresh sound and perspective. Electronic textures and dark melodies underpin some of Van Etten’s typically soul-baring narratives, this time informed by motherhood and maturity rather than heartbreak. But the results are just as cathartic, never more than in the anthemic “Seventeen.”
6. Woods + Segal, “Hiding Places” (Backwoodz Studioz): The cover art for this collaboration between veteran New York City MC Billy Woods and classically trained Los Angeles underground producer Kenny Segal focuses on a decrepit three-story building, on the verge of collapse. Each song could represent a room in this haunted house, a depiction of African American life on the margins of financial solvency and psychic equilibrium. The music, disturbed and disquieting, matches Woods’ stark, vivid truthtelling about the mundane details of a lifetime on the fringe: “I was in the ceiling when they swept the building / I kept my head down when the cops came for the children.”
7. Sturgill Simpson, “Sound & Fury” (Elektra): The Kentucky maverick has been typecast as a Waylon Jennings-style country rebel, but the only rules to which he’s adhering are his own. As the album credits declare on his fourth studio studio album: “(Expletive) your speakers.” Ditto for your expectations. The mix of blast-furnace Neil-Young-andCrazy-Horse feedback and fed-up attitude makes for a bracing, blistering soundtrack for the times.
8. Kills Birds, “Kills Birds” (KRO): Bosnian-born singer Nina Ljeti sings herself breathless on “Volcano,” but she can’t stop, won’t stop. Seconds after the song feels like it’s about to collapse, she comes roaring back, a woman who won’t be erased. Her powerpunching trio matches her fury and her finesse between outbursts on this short, sharp, shock of a debut album.
9. Yugen Blakrok, “Anima Mysterium” (I.O.T.): Game recognizes game, as Kendrick Lamar affirmed when he handpicked this South African MC for the “Black Panther” soundtrack. Like a raspy-voice oracle, she waxes mystical on future worlds devoid of boundaries on her second album. “I misread the rules and made my own like a pagan,” she raps. Melodies emerge from the trippy swirl of bubbling synths and decaying beats, the atmosphere thick with cryptic visions and ghostly echoes.
10. Shana Cleveland, “Night of the Worm Moon” (Hardly Art): Taking a break from her surf-noir combo La Luz, the singer yearns for a world beyond. “You’ve gone where I can’t go,” Cleveland sings. Dreamily psychedelic orchestration, finge-picked guitar and melancholy vocals — to paraphrase Elvis, it’s a sound in which to get real, real gone.
The next 10: The Comet is Coming, “Trust the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery”; Dave, “Psychodrama” (Neighbourhood); Julia Jacklin, “Crushing” (Polyvinyl); Brittany Howard, “Jaime” (ATO); Pip Blom, “Boat” (Heavenly): Jenny Lewis, “On the Line” (Warner); Mekons, “Deserted” (Sin/Bloodshot); Control Top, “Covert Contracts” (Get Better); Joan Shelley, “Like the River Loves the Sea” (No Quarter); Pist Idiots, “Ticker” (Space 44).