this will be our year (year-end bests)
Happy New Year! Most of this newsletter is about some year-end surveys you might want to check out, but I've made two stream-ready mixtapes of my musical year over on Mixcloud. You can listen to part 1 and/or part 2 while you put away your holiday decorations and eat the last of those cookies.
Some Lists
Early January is one of my favorite times for music discovery - I always find something new-to-me on the year-end best-of lists. Here's what I've been working through the past couple of weeks as we enter prime list-reviewing season.
- Fluxblog has a 2021 "survey" playlist - not only does Matthew Perpetua have a wide-ranging appetite for new music, he has a great attitude about making lists and sharing music. More on that in a bit.
- Pitchfork of course has their big list.
- Metacritic is a great way to find what's generally agreed-upon to be very good, and the generator has generated that 2021 list.
- I usually like what The Onion A.V. Club puts together.
- I follow Stereogum and am working through their year-end best albums. But they also offer sublists around hardcore and hip-hop if you're feeling like you're behind in a particular genre.
- Aquarium Drunkard is another blog that I check out occasionally, and they have a "year in review" page that would take me a year to work through.
Highlights and intentions from those lists:
- I am excited to get into a Duran Duran album I didn't know about, the Japanese Breakfast record I haven't checked out, and something called King Woman which is very well regarded in rock circles.
- I never really gave the new Low a chance, and the War on Drugs seems to be getting a lot of mentions. Likewise I've seen Weather Station mentioned a few times and I'll give it a try.
- While I did listen to Snail Mail and Turnstile and Dawn Richard, I need to give them deeper listens. I'll let you know!
If you put together your own 2021 list, I invite you to send it my way. Doesn't have to be a list, actually.
The Vinyl Score 2021 Yearbook
There was a time that I would sort through the nine or ten albums I could remember being released in a year, battle them against each other for supremacy, and write that up in whatever blog or notebook I had handy. When you had to spend $15 on each new release, that was a thoughtful investment - and you'd listen to those pretty deeply.
The start of streaming, though, was heralded as the end of albums - we'd only have singles and playlists from here on out. (Albums were for super-dedicated fans.) That hasn't exactly played out - I'm still really interested in albums and seek them out, though I'm trying to get better at using playlists to find new things as they're happening.
For a few years, Fluxblog has posted a "survey" of the year - not an ordered list of what's "better" or "worse", but a snapshot of the music from the year. Perpetua's lists are roughly organized into sequences or sublists that map to genres or moods, and they're usually so large it's easy to get lost. His 2021 list on Spotify runs 62 hours, and yet he insists there's a thoughtful sequencing to the first 700 or so tracks. (I think that's funny, but I also very much believe him.) And yes, that's on Spotify (he also publishes the same list to Apple Music), though in previous years he would just open up a torrent containing every MP3 and let you download the whole thing. That seems silly now: this is a playlist for discovery in this moment, not an almanac to store on your hard drive forever.
I'm taking a similar approach with my 2021 list. I've listed a number of albums or tracks that I discovered in the past 12 months (I'm pretty sure), or at least it sort of approximates the things I was most moved by / humming throughout the year. It's a courteous 2h44m, and I've made it available on Spotify.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0TNqtAuNPEO9jACa4Wk7Ez?si=0dddfc0f309046ed
Resolutions
The other thing we do at the end of the year is plan a little - make some goals and try to be a better person. In 2022, I'd like to:
- Balance music discovery with pre-existing fandoms. If you feel intimidate by all these bands you've never heard of on the year-end best-ofs, well, you're not alone. I need to find a couple of playlists that will help me feel a little bit in front of what's happening.
- Stream more music mixes, and work more personality into that mix. Some of you have tuned into the livestreams for the music mixes, and I've changed my setup a little bit - but I haven't sorted out how to (easily) work my microphone into that, or better yet, how to get live call-ins to work. You want to talk with me about music on the internet, right? That'd be a show.
- Spend more money with Bandcamp. At last count I was paying for Spotify (a family plan), Apple Music (another family plan, as part of Apple One), Pandora, and SiriusXM (in two cars). As you've read in these very pages, almost none of that goes to artists - you've got to go to shows and buy things from them. Bandcamp is nearly as easy as the iTunes Store, and takes a much smaller cut. The hard part for me is buying the digital album (for $10) instead of the vinyl version (for $20) because I'm running out of room for records.
- See more shows. I wouldn't say that the second half of 2021 was "normal", quite, but it was good to get back into Turf Club, First Avenue, the Palace, and Surly to be in an audience and see shows. I may give myself a pass on January (Minneapolis hasn't felt the full brunt of omicron yet, but I think we're seeing that it's a big spike that collapses quickly and seems to mostly spare the vaccinated? More to come), but I hope to get out 2-3 times a month once February comes.
A Calendar
So, to recap last month's calendar: I did actually see Bad Bad Hats, though we nearly got stuck in a snowstorm. (There's worse places to be trapped than the Mainroom, though.) And I did buy tickets to Dessa, though that got moved to February thanks to pandemic conditions.
Caroline Polachek was amazing and the Gorillaz movie-concert was fine. I also got invited to Yam Haus at the Palace - which made me nostalgic for the days when pop-rock like the Strokes and White Stripes united us all. Maybe Yam Haus can be next.
January is a rough time for tours, because tours generally have choices about when they come to Minnesota, if you have choices, you generally choose to be here in March or November if you can. So what you see in January is a few local acts, a couple "residencies", some radio stations hosting their festival-type concerts, and a smattering of acts that didn't look too closely at which American cities have highs below zero in the long-term forecast. We welcome you!
What I'm considering in January (more-or-less-solid plans in bold):
- 1/7 - Best New Bands at First Avenue. I saw this two years ago and it's epic by which I mean long. But you don't have to stay and watch the whole thing. Like everything else in January, it hasn't been cancelled / postponed yet.
- 1/8 - Dosh at 7th Street Entry. Not super familiar with this guy but he's almost certainly a top-three Minnesota hip-hop guy? You have to check out your top-three Minnesota hip-hop guys.
- 1/8 and 1/9 - Wrestlepalooza? People tell me this is fun but I don't think it can possibly be that fun. Nur-D will be there.
- 1/14 - G. Love and the Juice at First Avenue. "The Juice" is the name of the last album credited to G. Love and Special Sauce, and the GL&SS website crows about a Grammy nomination for that album, so I'm not sure why the tour is promoted as "G. Love and the Juice". I wouldn't say I'm super-interested in any G. Love-centric permutation, but I know a lot of people in my orbit are big fans of his work from the 90's.
- 1/18 - Best Coast at Fine Line. I might have just decided that having tried to like Best Coast's lukewarm fuzz-rock for ten years maybe it's just not going to work out. But also I've never seen them live.
- 1/22 and 1/29 - The Current's Anniversary Party at First Avenue. We're lucky to have The Current, frustrating though they can be, but because I don't really listen to them all that much, I don't know a ton about many of the bands they're bringing in to celebrate. (Though I would go see The Beths if it was just them.)
- 1/22 - Courtney Barnett at the Palace. I'm not a CB super-fan and am just learning that she put out a new album in November.
- 1/25 - Jeff Rosenstock at First Avenue. Rosenstock's "SKA DREAM" landed on my radar this year and I've been talking about it to anyone who will listen - his super-fun pop-punk will sound awesome in that space with a huge crowd. (Very hopeful that the January variant wave is done by that point and hasn't been replaced by another variant wave.)
- 1/27 and 1/28 - Motion City Soundtrack at First Avenue. I don't know a ton about MCS's music, but I saw Justin Courtney Pierre speak on a panel about mental health and addiction issues and really liked him a lot.
- 1/31 - Washed Out at Fine Line. What do you suppose a Washed Out show looks like? Do people go nuts when he plays the song from Portlandia? That's when I would go nuts.
