My Music Year, 2024
It was a big year for me, musically. I released an album, wrote a long essay on my infatuation with the steel guitar, and left my radio job after fifteen years for a new adventure.
As a musician and music professional, I can find it hard to just enjoy music, but this year I also made a conscious effort to reconnect to that feeling—no discourse, no obligation, no background audio wallpaper. I’d pull up an album, lie down on the couch or my bed, and just listen, just like I used to as a teenager with my Sony Discman.
Speaking of which, I also started buying CDs again. With the price of vinyl (used and new) continuing to skyrocket, I find CDs a nice compromise: cheap, easy to store, and a tangible object that still imparts more meaning to the listening experience (CD booklets are extremely underrated, y’all). Over the year, I spent about $50 on a wide variety of stuff: Hank Williams, Curtis Mayfield, and New Order best ofs; classics from Leonard Cohen, Herbie Hancock, Yo La Tengo, and the Orb; that Hildegard Von Bingen CD that your parents or grandparents probably bought in the ‘80s (and now fills used bins for pennies).
Some great books lent some direction to my listening this year. Brendan Greaves’ totemic biography of Terry Allen, Truckload of Art, sent me through Terry’s bizarre discography, which encompasses wry country music, avant-garde radio dramas, and Americana concept albums. I especially fell in love with Smokin The Dummy, Terry’s country-rock 1980 barnstormer (it rips hard).
Finally finding Light In The Attic’s Acetone compilation on vinyl led me to Sam Sweet’s biography of the band, Hadley Lee Lightcap, one of the best music books I’ve ever read. The band’s mix of soul, psych rock, and dollar-bin exotica is still intoxicating; I went real hard for this Numero Group exotica comp in the summer.
The triple digits were also soundtracked by Robert Gordon’s It Came From Memphis, a sonic history of America’s greatest musical city: Bukka White, Alex Chilton, Tav Falco, James Carr, Stax, Goner, the list goes on and on. My Southern deep dive led me on a tangent towards the Complete Basement Tapes. I listened to all six hours so you don’t have to; I made this playlist from my favorites and fell back in love with Dylan in his shaggy, stoned mode.
I listened to Broadcast’s two archival releases—Spell Blanket and Distant Call—the most this year. It is a tragedy that these will be it for the band; these songs, even as demos or sketches, are infinite little jewel boxes.
I found that same quality in Jessica Pratt’s Here In The Pitch and Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee. The former is solitary and reassuring, like an old dive bar lit up with Christmas lights. Diamond Jubilee is that same bar but with David Lynch as your eerie drinking partner.
Armbruster’s Can I Sit Here was this year’s distorted masterpiece, without using a single guitar: a violin can sound heavy.
With Mk.gee’s Two Star And The Dream Police and Chanel Beads’ Your Day Will Come, guitars don’t sound like guitars. They’re bent into pure electricity, or pixelated into gauzy clouds. The future is uncertain, and the music can be too and still engrossing.
Seefeel, one of my favorite bands, returned with Everything Squared. The group started out in the early ‘90s as an electronic band making shoegaze (or is it the other way round?), but on this mini-album, the songs are sparse, looping, fragile.
Bartosz Kruczynski opted for sparseness too on Dreams And Whispers on the excellent ambient-ish label Balmat, co-founded by electronic music critic Philip Sherburne.
His adventurous newsletter,
, turned me on to upsammy’s chiming, mysterious (and sparse) Strange Meridians, as well as the best “don’t call it shoegaze” shoegaze album I’ve heard in awhile in Belong’s Realistic IX. The band bristles at the genre tag, and I get it—their music is starker, more minimalist, and noisier than that lineage.Cloud Nothings gave me a good heartpounding, fist-pumping punk rager in Final Summer, a great record to run to. As is Donato Dozzy’s Magda, an atmospheric house record where not much happens, but it feels good to luxuriate in the sounds.
A lot happens in Andrew Tasselmyer’s ambient miniatures, and Where Substance Meets Emptiness is my first introduction to his tactile sensibility. Wilco’s Patrick Sansone released an excellent synth record in Infinity Mirrors; these soundscapes are on a maximal, widescreen scale.
L.A.’s Dummy returned with Free Energy, continuing to combine rock and Steve Reich-like repetition in interesting ways. So does Ex-Easter Island Head with Norther, where the guitars are played like drums.
I don’t know what the heck Turner Williams Jr. is doing to his guitar on ensoleillée, but it sounds futuristic and ancient at the same time. Through effects and stubborn, singular playing techniques, he’s finding a new path.
Punk traditionalists X bowed out with Smoke & Fiction, proving again that twang can be more feral than familiar.
I also discovered Greg Freeman’s 2022 masterpiece I Looked Out, a country-adjacent record wrapped in barbed wire, sound collage, and a Neutral Milk Hotel-like emotional intensity. 2014’s self titled from the European group Fumaça Preta was another great excavation for me, blending psych rock with Brazilian, Latin, and African rhythms.