2024, shut the front door

Year's best: singing in stormy weather

This household is clearly cherishing every memory, moment and possibility. Spotted near Trinity Bellwoods just before Christmas.

50 from 2024: my 10 favourite albums, 10 underdogs, 20 other albums, and 10 songs that aren’t on any of those albums. Everything in alphabetical order—except I picked one album above all the rest, because, you, dear reader, only have so much time and attention, and despite my verbosity I’ll attempt to respect that.

This a quite obviously objectively true list, by a 53-year-old white dad from Toronto. Make of that what you will. Also, I’ve read most of the other lists and they’re clearly wrong about everything!

Most of the links to full reviews are paywalled, as will be the playlists that will follow shortly (UPDATE: they’re here). So:

10 albums you need to hear before the year is over

1. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings – Woodland

Reviewed here: “Welch and Rawlings play music that reminds you that we’ve been here before: in 1968, in 1929, in 1861.

When chaos reigns, as it soon will, familiar anchors are essential comfort—especially with harmonies like these, sung as if they’re sitting bedside while you get horizontal and take a long series of deep breaths.

Also: those guitars. Welch and Rawlings are not flashy players to the lay ear, but they communicate through deeply interwoven picking and leads, where every Sterling Morrison-esque slight bend speaks volumes. It’s completely intoxicating, and more obviously brilliant the older they get.”

The rest of the top 10 in alphabetical order:

Les Amazones d’Afrique – Musow Danse

Reviewed here. “Move over, Boygenius. This West African supergroup is… ah, who’s kidding who, they have nothing in common — other than being a supergroup focused on sisterhood and uplift. Les Amazones are older (like me), a lot more fun and joyous (to me), and more explicitly feminist than anyone this side of Le Tigre (in a language I don’t speak)...

The arrangements here, while distinctly African — with balafons and Congotronic-y distorted kalimbas — are very much modern pop and could slip into a mix with Robyn or Rihanna. The honeyed harmonies are, obviously, stunning and stirring. The beats are huge: the bass is even bigger. I mean, check out the wildly woozy, wiggling, subterranean synth-bass line on this track and TURN IT UP:”

Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee

Earlier Blue Velvet-y essay here.

Further: I posit that much of this record’s year-end acclaim comes from a sense of mystery, of inaccessability (even though the whole thing has been officially streaming on YouTube since day one), but most of all embracing a sense of brokenness.

Our systems are broken. Our world is broken. Our peace is broken. And yet so much of our culture presents a facade of perfection. This album does not do that. It is inherently broken. And yet triumphant.

What could I find
In a fantasy
A burning memory
Of something true
Something true

In a year when MAGA rats seized power by peddling false history, the entire aesthetic of this Albertan’s Diamond Jubilee was nostalgia of a different kind: of teenage dreams, of Dylanesque reinvention, of making the most out of limited choices, of pushing against restraints both internal and external.

Diamond Jubilee doesn’t sugarcoat, although it’s often sweet. Its rough edges are its most beautiful qualities. Remember the first time you heard The Velvet Underground and Nico? Teenage me was befuddled. I soon learned the most rewarding treasures often don’t come wrapped in tidy bows. They demand closer examination, demand you lean in and do a bit of work. Peel back the veil and behold.

And of course: Hearts on Fire readers will more than appreciate the nature of this album’s success story, culminating in the fact it topped many year-end lists in ways we haven’t been used to for 20 years.

Ducks Ltd. – Harm’s Way

Reviewed here: “Ducks Ltd. readily cop to their influences and come off as crate-diggers with a very serious niche. Normally this could be off-putting, as if this band is specifically engineered to appeal to a fiftysomething’s nostalgia …

There’s a natural propulsion to everything Ducks Ltd. does — this is a band that doesn’t stare at their shoes unless they’re tying up their laces before a run. Harmony-laden indie rock doesn’t normally make good gym music; Ducks Ltd. is here to change that.”

Amaro Freitas – Y’Y

Reviewed here: “Dude, pass the rainstick. And the kalimba. And maybe let Amazonian insects crawl inside your piano while you’re playing it, like some kind of Hauschka in the jungle. Freitas is a jazz pianist from Recife in northeastern Brazil. Before making his fourth album, he spent some quality time deep in the Amazon forest, which is more than evident in the sounds here.

Y’Y (pron. “eey-eh, eey-eh”) is nothing if not vivid: the sounds, rhythms and melodies here conjure birdsong, flora, fauna and rivers. While often meditative and beautiful—rainsticks!—Y’Y can also be as fierce as a tropical storm, Freitas’s fingers flying furiously in ways that remind you piano is a percussion instrument.”

Jlin – Akoma

Reviewed here: “Akona is the fastest 43-minute album of 2024. Not because of its tempos—although that’s part of it—but because time flies when Jlin rarely sticks to a groove or pattern for more than four bars. Kind of like the news cycle. Her rhythmic centre is constantly shifting, the textures flittering about, drifting apart and reconstituting into something even more beautiful. Such is life.

Akona is the sound of modern life: of possibility amidst ruin; of bridging seemingly incongruous gaps; of looking forward, not back.”

Michael Kiwanuka – Small Changes

Reviewed here: “Small Changes is very much a mood piece, varying little in tempo or feel—which is totally fine, because this is a mood you want to sink right into, especially these days.

While Kiwanuka is obviously front and centre, he’s far from the star. The songs themselves are fine—they’re mostly vehicles for what is very much a band record, including the string section. If there is a star here, it’s all-timer Pino Palladino (Paul Young, D’Angelo) on bass—his lines avoid lethargy in what could’ve been one long opiated ride. Oh, and on the drums? That’s 85-year-old James Gadson, who played with everyone from Bill Withers to Beck. If that wasn’t enough, on Hammond organ is Jimmy Jam (Janet Jackson, The Time, etc.). If you’re going to make a band record, that’s one helluva band.”

Corb Lund – El Viejo

The only Hearts on Fire alum on this year’s list. Gotta love an album with the opening line: “I guess it depends on what you mean by collusion.”

Reviewed here: “His new one, El Viejo, might well [be one of the Albertan’s best]: it’s an all-acoustic set of new originals recorded live in his living room, though it sounds so good you’d never know that. There are, as usual, more than a few songs about playing cards. The melodies harken back to the Spanish influences of his earliest solo work. During pandemic lockdowns he took guitar lessons for the first time in years, this time from Megadeth’s guitarist. There’s a sobering song called ‘Redneck Rehab.’ And the title track is a tip of the Stetson to Corb’s long-time pal and mentor, the late Ian Tyson.

Didn’t think you’d see Megadeth and Ian Tyson in the same paragraph, did you? You will when you write about Corb Lund, who is also one of the few western songwriters I can imagine, other than maybe Steve Earle, who would write a song titled ‘Insha’Allah.’”

Pet Shop Boys – Nonetheless

Reviewed here: “Neil Tennant is now 70 years old. To the ears of this casual fan, he and Chris Lowe just put out Pet Shop Boys’ best record in decades. It follows a sprawling singles collection that covered 35 years of hits, released last year.

“Maybe the timing is not a coincidence: Nonetheless seems like they decided to condense the best of everything they’ve ever done into these ten new songs. It’s that good. It’s Brit-Berlin breezy electro-pop at its best, mixing melancholy and nostalgia with major-key melodic mastery and Ibiza beats.

In one word: Schlager!

Here’s a shockingly good lighter-waving ballad:”

Kim Richey – Every New Beginning

Reviewed here: “Every New Beginning might just be the best thing this 67-year-old has ever done … This is my country-road-driving-with-windows-down album of the summer. And when she sings a mantra-like chorus of, ‘It hurts like it’s always going to feel this way,’ I’ll try to tune out the news.”

—

A few weeks ago, just before the onslaught of lists, I published not necessarily my 10 favourites of the year, but the 10 favourite records I didn’t expect to see on any other lists. After all, all lists are defined by their outliers, in an age of critical consensus and cultural juggernauts. With the exception of Big Brave and Corridor getting a nod in Exclaim!’s top 50 (#36 and #17, respectively), and the Messthetics getting some NPR love, I’m not aware of any of these records getting celebrated on any major sites. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Baby Rose w/ BadBadNotGood – Slow Burn.

Big Brave – A Chaos of Flowers.

Corridor – Mimi.

Cuff the Duke – Breaking Dawn.

Ibibio Sound Machine – Pull the Rope.

Abigail Lapell - Anniversary.

Richard Laviolette – All Wild Things Are Shy.

Man Man – Carrot on Strings.

Messthetics w/ James Brandon Lewis – s/t.

Tindersticks – Soft Tissue.

For blurbs and samples of these underdogs, go to this post.

Got a lot of time on your hands? Well then:

Rest of the best

Allie X – Girl With No Face

Reviewed here: “If these songs didn’t stand on their own —which they do — Girl With No Face could almost be a genre experiment, one that’s designed perfectly to appeal to fiftysomethings and their teenage kids who love ‘Blinding Lights’ and Stranger Things.”

Arab Strap – I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give a Fuck Anymore

Reviewed here: “Confession: I always hated this band. I love this album. Did they change or did I?”

Bibi Club – Feu de garde

Reviewed here: “Their lyrics, largely in French, are about, in their words, quotidian magic. Their music is shimmering beauty, all sun-baked guitars, dancing drum machines and blissed-out synth serving tiny perfect pop songs … mood music for francophile post-punk-new-wave-indie-rockers who now daytime dance in the living room with young children.”

The Body – The Crying Out of Things

Reviewed here: “This Nov. 8 release has been good primal scream therapy this week … as ugly as the world feels right now, the audio equivalent of the coarsest skin scrub imaginable, and it’s 100% glorious.”

Jennifer Castle – Camelot

Reviewed here: “She maintains all her haunting mystery with a rock-solid band behind her.”

Four Tet – Three

Reviewed here: “The boss of boom-bap-tinkle-tinkle triumphs again, with an album that encapsulates much of what he does best … It’s mycelium music, conjuring the sounds of springtime streams and returning birdsong, tickling your brain in all the most beautiful places.”

Myriam Gendron – Mayday

Reviewed here: “Gendron sings, in both English and French, like someone who’s lived through a war or two, metaphorical or otherwise. She’s a late-bloomer: a middle-aged parent who is, on this, her third album, grieving the loss of her own parent. Put simply: it’s a bummer. And yet the lilt of her guitar and her Nico-ish delivery are completely entrancing. Uplifting, even, in the way that recognizing someone else’s darkness in your own can be. Myriam Gendron knows. You can feel it.”

Christian Lee Hutson – Paradise Pop. 10

Reviewed here: “Melodically rich and melancholy, like an Alexander Payne movie set in autumn. His character portraits, narratives and wit come off like Sufjan Stevens covering Warren Zevon. I’m quite positive that Aimee Mann and Elliott Smith didn’t procreate 34 years ago, but if they did…”

Amythyst Kiah – Still + Bright

Reviewed here: “Here, she mostly puts the banjo down and makes a rock record—albeit one that maintains the tone of the observant folk singer maintaining spiritual strength in a crumbling society.”

Lemon Bucket Orkestra – Cuckoo

Reviewed here: “This has always been a live band first and foremost, because nothing could ever replicate the full-body thrill of standing in a crowd of people, the Lemon Bucketeers among them, surrounding you with a full brass attack and bow-shredding violin, bopping with a buoyant crowd with hands in the air … Cuckoo does everything a Lemon Bucket record should: bottle their live energy while leaving room for the less frantic moments, like the Ukrainian vocal opener ‘Shchedryj Vechor’ or the haunting Macedonian ballad ‘Zjadi Zjadi.’”

LL Cool J – The Force

Reviewed here: “The main draw here is the fact that Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip is behind the boards. This is a supremely funky record—in all the ways that crotchety ‘golden era of hip-hop’ fans like to kvetch that trap and post-trap is not.”

Willie Nelson – Last Leaf on the Tree

Reviewed here: “There’s no particular reason to have any expectations at all of Last Leaf on the Tree … but it’s definitely one of the best extremely-late-career albums I’ve heard by anyone in recent years. Throughout, the 91-year-old Nelson sounds his age—but strong and confident and not, say, like Johnny Cash’s final recordings. He lets his son Micah loose with the production, and the younger Nelson sounds like he learned some lessons from the Lanois-produced Teatro.”

Nyssa – Shake Me Where I’m Foolish

Reviewed here: “Some bad news: there’s no possible way this album could capture what I witnessed [live]. The good news: it’s still a very good record.”

Orkestar Kriminal – Originali

Reviewed here: “Orkestar Kriminal is a somewhat unwieldy band: strings, horns, accordion, clarinet, even a musical saw — with the wild Giselle Webber up front. The music is klezmer-esque with Greek rembetika and a whole lot more: this Montreal band steals from far and wide (but especially from Parc X), with the deft skill of an expert pickpocket.”

Sleater-Kinney – Little Rope

Discussed them in this essay paralleling them with Rush: “Sleater-Kinney are no longer the band I once loved, for neither better nor worse: the founding duo have shed skin, aged in the best ways, transformed.”

From my pre-emptive (premature?) Pitchfork obit: “I can’t stop listening to [this song] … [In the video] I feel like J. Smith Cameron is acting out the role of an aging music critic trying desperately to pitch ideas to unresponsive editors and be noticed in an uncaring world. Obviously that’s not what the song or the video is meant to be about. That’s just me.”

Clearly a song of the year—all year.

The The – Ensouled

Reviewed here: “The The in 2024 sound exactly the way you want them to: musically mellower but acerbic as always. Johnson was always a crotchety class warrior hatched in Thatcherism, and Brexit-era Britain certainly wasn’t going to change that.”

Vampire Weekend – Only God Above Us

Never got around to reviewing this: maybe it seemed too obvious? I often take this band for granted, and I’m not alone: this is fantastic. Somewhere deep inside me there’s a thinkpiece about how somewhere amidst all the New Yorkism here is a song cycle about Israel in a post-Oct. 7 world, but I’m neither smart nor Jewish enough to write it. The album opens with “You don’t want to win this war coz you don’t want the peace.” It ends with “The righteous rage was foolish pride / the conquerors did not divide / the call keeps coming from inside / I hope you let it go / The enemy is invincible / I hope you let it go.”

Morgan Wade – Obsessed

Never got around to reviewing this one, either. Will Hermes convinced me here. Americana UK reviewed it here. This is mainstream queer Nashville at its finest:

Rick White & Sadies – s/t

Reviewed here: “White of course brings the Sadies’ psychedelic side to the fore, but this also sounds like a natural follow-up to Colder Streams [the Sadies’ excellent, final record with founder Dallas Good] … The music they make together may be rooted in darkness and grief, but it sounds very much alive and in vivid colours—just like White’s illustration on the album cover.”

Wussy – Cincinatti Ohio

Reviewed here: “In a record named after their Rust Belt hometown, Wussy capture a sense of lost possibility … Cincinatti Ohio is the sound of faded glory, the sound of watching future generations opiate themselves medically and technologically. It’s a record made in the wake of a personal loss. It’s a record released shortly after a consequential election and at the dawn of an uncertain winter … Time to light candles, even if to cling to flickering fantasies … Great songs, haunting arrangements, pulsing with blood inside middle-aged people determined to create something beautiful when everything seems to be falling apart. Nothing wussy about that.”

Favourite songs that aren’t on any of those albums:

1. “Guilty” by Hugh Christopher Brown w/ Kate Fenner. For all the reasons.

“U Should Not Be Doing That” by Amyl & the Sniffers. God forbid we have some fun.

“Turn the Card Slowly” by the Gossip. Had high hopes for this comeback album, which was merely fine—with the exception of this standout.

“Birthday in Rehab” by Hot Mud. “There’s a layer-cake of mixed-up feeling / Group hugs and therapy meetings.”

Adrianne Lenker – “Donut Seam.” Willing to forgive that Big Thief show at Massey Hall if she keeps writing songs like this. In apocalyptic times, go swimming while you can.

“Mood Swings” by Lil Simz. Current moods.

“Dreamer” by Kelly McMichael. Easy listening for hard times.

“Coloured Concrete” by Nemahsis. Breakout Canadian pop artist of 2024.

“Better Days” by Nicolette & the Nobodies. Even better days are coming for this artist.

“Casual” by Chappell Roan. For not just frustrated part-time lovers but “permalance” workers everywhere.

“Back for the Funeral” by Donovan Woods. Welcome to your fifties.

2023 holdovers

Three records I totally slept on this time last year.

Jaime Branch – Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war))

Reviewed here: “Branch was a jazz trumpeter with an expansive definition of that term. In her own words, she was ‘a psychedelic warrior for peace, making music into the void due to a deep belief that music changes the world on a cellular level’ …

Tracks travel from modern electronics to New Orleans to calypso to Latin salsa to dub to Ethiopia to an entirely unexpected folkie take on the Meat Puppets. Everything works, and works together. It’s nothing short of brilliant.”

Frankie & the Witch Fingers – Data Doom

Fell in love with this explosive L.A. psych band after they put on one of my favourite shows of the year, reviewed here. Reviewed their 2024 live album here: “This is a hurricane force of a band, the kind of psych-metal-boogie onslaught that (consensually) slaps you across the face and lifts you off your feet before launching you into space—if you’re into that.”

Moonriivr – Vol. 1

A Hillside highlight. Reviewed here: “Their music sounds like their name: reverb-heavy, romantic ’50s balladry for slow dancing after a rockabilly band packs it up for the night … dreamy, haunting and swoony … like a less creepy Timber Timbre, on many levels.” File next to Cindy Lee. Currently backing up July Talk’s Peter Dreams, new album together out soon.

That’s it! Dive in! Support the artists you love. Go see live music. Tell me your favourites in the comments.

A 50-song playlist to follow, for paid subscribers only.

Thank you for reading (especially if you actually read this far). It means the world to me.

Peace in the new year.