2019 in Review
Soon I will be banging my head against the wall to make an end-of-decade list, but for now, here's the best music of 2019, keeping my tedious writing as brief as possible.
The 25 Best Songs of 2019
25. William Doyle - 'Nobody Else Will Tell You'
Very Brian Eno, which is great.
24. Wilco - 'Love Is Everywhere (Beware)'
A low key folk rock song with a killer guitar line.
23. The Tallest Man on Earth - 'I'm a Stranger Now'
Kristian Mattson has started becoming a bit by-the-numbers, but he still knows how to write a great song.
22. Alex Cameron - 'Far from Born Again'
A defence of sex workers set to a goofy beat and some dooh-dooh-ing. Catchy as hell.
21. The National - 'Light Years'
The last in a long line of great piano ballads from The National. They could write them in their sleep at this point.
20. FKA twigs - 'Cellophane'
Her best vocal performance yet. It's weird that a song this raw and sad is actually about Robert Pattinson, though.
19. Pup - 'Scorpion Hill'
I keep telling myself I don't like pop punk, and yet here we are.
18. Lil Nas X - 'Old Town Road (Remix)'
This is now one of the biggest songs of all time. It was a great song to start with, and with the remix, Miley Cyrus' father has finally birthed something good.
17. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - 'Hollywood'
A 14-minute epic rambling about fire, cougars, and a Buddhist story of loss. It's classic Cave, and also very much not that at all.
16. Sharon Van Etten - 'Seventeen'
A great singer tries her hardest to tear her vocal cords to shreds, and it's great.
15. Billie Eilish - 'Bad Guy'
Yeah, 2019 actually had two hit songs that were really good. When my little sister is quoting it on Instagram while my girlfriend is dancing around to it at home, you know a song has got legs.
14. Daniel Norgren - 'The Flow'
Very atmospheric and chill rock song with some very strange whistling in it.
13. Thom Yorke - 'Dawn Chorus'
Basically a poem, delivered in a near monotone voice, and it's one of the most beautiful things he's ever done.
12. Charli XCX featuring Christine and the Queens - 'Gone'
The best pop song of the year.
11. Tyler, the Creator - 'EARFQUAKE'
Not sure how a song this goofy-sounding can be so romantic and tortured, but somehow it manages.
10. Craig Finn - 'A Bathtub in the Kitchen'
Craig Finn is very good at writing about sad people begging their friends for money. "I can't keep saying thank you, Francis" is one of the best lyric lines of the year, trust me.
9. Purple Mountains - 'That's Just the Way That I Feel'
David Berman wrote one of the funniest, cleverest and most musically upbeat songs of his career. It's also one of 10 songs that effectively served as his suicide note.
8. The 1975 - 'People'
I used to think the 1975 were trying to be the new Coldplay, and here they are, kind of sounding like Marilyn Manson.
7. Lana Del Rey - 'Norman fucking Rockwell'
Sort of the "Cool Girl" speech from Gone Girl, except funny and gorgeous. Four or five other Lana Del Rey songs could have made this spot, but this one wins out because I really like that little gallopping thing that the piano does. It's a thing that I'm into.
6. Mister Ferrari - 'Judy Jo'
The music video features clips from Betty Boop, and clips of Cab Calloway dancing. The fact that the song fits perfectly with those visuals is amazing. Now fucking release the album already.
5. A.A. Bondy - 'Diamond Skull'
Scattered images of modern society set to bluesy guitar strumming. It's another thing that I'm into.
4. (Sandy) Alex G - 'Gretel'
A confusing mishmash of chipmunk vocals, classic indie folk and a dark and dramatic and perfect guitar line that should clash with everything else, but doesn't.
3. Bon Iver - 'Hey, Ma'
Justin Vernon's lyrics are kind of fragmented and obscure by design, but "full time you talk your money up while it's living in a coal mine" really hits like a brick for me. The chorus is also just the most plainly gorgeous thing he's ever done, and plainly gorgeous is kind of his thing.
2. These New Puritans - 'Infinity Vibraphones'
High art rock drama. Also truth in advertising; those vibraphones feel pretty damn infinite to me.
1. Big Thief - 'Cattails'
Everything about this song is great - the loose drumming, the piano freakouts in the background, Adrienne Lenker's beautiful lyrics and breathy delivery - but the real reason this song is at the top of my list is because of that guitar line. It's a 12-string acoustic guitar line that has a real forward momentum to it, and it is absolutely mesmerising. I live for the parts of this song where the guitar is just allowed to breathe and swell and be perfect.
The 10 Best Albums of 2019
10. Daniel Norgren - Wooh Dang
Apparently, this weird Swedish dude has been making Rolling Stones-inspired roots music for years, and nobody saw fit to inform me. Not every song lands, but some of the ones that do could have been on Exile on Main St.
9. William Doyle - Your Wilderness Revisited
I discovered this pretty late in the year, and still haven't really absorbed it. But any album that is this clearly indebted to Brian Eno albums like Another Green World (and that actually features Eno on a track) is worth absorbing.
8. Big Thief - U.F.O.F.
Big Thief released two very good folk rock albums in the same year. This first one is the best, though. 'Cattails' is actually a bit of an anomaly, the rest being less exuberant and a bit darker. Still, a great album.
7. Craig Finn - I Need a New War
Craig Finn also released an album with his fantastic band The Hold Steady in 2019, and it was good, but I think he saved the best for himself. This album is full of beautiful character portraits, personality and warmth.
6. These New Puritans - Inside the Rose
This is a criminally underrated and overlooked British band who took six years to follow up one of the best albums of the decade (spoilers), and it seems like this barely made a blip. Well, that's bullshit. This is a gorgeous, meticulously arranged and produced album.
5. Bon Iver - i,i
Justin Vernon kind of combined the sounds of his last two albums, and made another really really really ridiculously good album.
4. Tyler, the Creator - IGOR
One of the great musical reinventions of the decade. I'm pretty sure I don't really have synesthesia, but when I listen to the messy, weird-ass music on this album, the colour scheme of the album cover swirls around in my head. I love it, is what I'm saying.
3. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Ghosteen
Nick Cave lost his son in 2015. His 2016 album Skeleton Tree was largely written before, and recorded after. As such, it had a shell-shocked, circling-the-drain kind of feeling to it. This is the first album he's written since his son's death, and it feels more like climbing up a tree to heaven, and not only because one of the songs literally uses that imagery. Like Skeleton Tree, it's quite unlike anything in his 40-year career.
2. Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains
David Berman left the music business for 10 years, then came back with one of the best albums of his career. A few weeks after it came out, he committed suicide. It's a testament to his skill as a writer and his delivery as a singer that everyone was shocked by this, in spite of song titles like 'All My Happiness Is Gone' and 'Maybe I'm the Only One for Me' and lines like "The dead know what they're doing when they leave this world behind". His music had this way of smiling through the pain that made it quite uplifting. As a final artistic statement, it's up there with Cohen or Bowie. It's heartbreaking, but, again, quite uplifting.
1. Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell!
Lana Del Rey has made some good songs in the past, but she always felt like a novelty act to me. Then, in 2018, she released 'Mariners Apartment Complex', her best song up to that point. A few weeks later, she released 'Venice Bitch', which was as good, if not better. Then I found out she was calling her next album "Norman Fucking Rockwell", and I was completely won over. I must have checked the internet weekly for updates about the release date, until it finally arrived at the end of August. Very rarely have I been that excited about a new album release, and had my expectations met so completely. 14 tracks, over an hour of music, and it's all great; funny, clever, vicious and beautiful.
Much like Father John Misty's Pure Comedy (also one of the best albums of the decade), it could have been released as a part of the Laurel Canyon scene in the early 70s, and would have been considered an absolute classic by now, except that the lyrics couldn't have been written any time but now, by anyone but her (or him, as in the contrasting example - sentence structuring is hard).
Halfway through 2019, I was worried it was going to turn out to be just as underwhelming as 2018 in terms of great music. But any year with an album this good is a good year for music.
