Culturedarm's Albums of the Year 2017

Credit: Photograph of Björk by Santiago Felipe

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20. Princess Nokia – 1992 Deluxe

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19. Kedr Livanskiy – Ariadna

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18. Waxahatchee – Out in the Storm

Katie Crutchfield has a remarkable knack for churning out three-minute pop songs, perfect because imperfect, a merging of the sounds and sensibilities of garage rock and singer-songwriter folk. They feel at once offhand and finely wrought, and there is nobody better at conveying in plain language the complex desires and motivations which transfigure even the most apparently mundane lives and relationships. Compared to the more synth-driven, psychedelic edge of her previous album Ivy Tripp, Out in the Storm finds Crutchfield in fully-fledged rock and roll mode, with one or two exceptions. ‘8 Ball’ features country-esque pans and strummed guitars offset by a deliberately muted, directionless, breathy vocal, a gently oscillating organ provides a meditative quality to ‘Recite Remorse’, and ‘Hear You’ is fuzzily buoyant.

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17. Ryuichi Sakamoto – async

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16. Ariel Pink – Dedicated to Bobby Jameson

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15. Moses Sumney – Aromanticism

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14. Kendrick Lamar – DAMN.

Following the jazz, funk, and soul-infused To Pimp a Butterfly, politically conscious, profoundly American, and Pan-African in scope, the conceit on DAMN. is more personal and straightforward yet almost seems a little too arch. As spelled out on the opener ‘BLOOD.’, its songs alternate between the ostensible poles of ‘wickedness’ and ‘weakness’, but rather than restricting the range of beats and samples on display, the dichotomy allows a certain freedom, to play between the lines and for radio-friendly bang and slap. Framed by an evocative origin story, Kendrick’s lyrics cover the breadth of lived experience, from childhood reminisces, to prime-time controversy over the content of his lyrics, to his pre-eminent rap status, to the cyclical mundane day-to-day. Where one finds weakness there is also patience and humility and perseverance, while on ‘ELEMENT.’ with its loping gloats, stuttering percussion and halting keys, even the wicked is suffused with ennui. ‘LOVE.’ is the exception, which floats by on a tropical breeze, Kendrick’s sweetest confection to date.

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13. Charlotte Gainsbourg – Rest

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12. Arca – Arca

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11. Laurel Halo – Dust

From the wobbly synths of ‘Jelly’, to the jazzy ‘Arschkriecher’, to the djembe drums, rumba rhythms, and big band flourishes of ‘Moontalk’, Dust finds Laurel Halo incorporating a wider range of genre influences into the usually robust sonic palette of bleeps, buzzes, and hums, skittering kicks, and abstract synth patches, elements alternately layered and foregrounded to create urbane, street-level, and cave-like compositions of place. This is the least confrontational album she’s made: rather than enacting the process of negotiation, it’s about defining the fraught space, and then leaving if desirable or necessary. Lyrics read like diagnoses, accusations, and open-ended questions, of the moment yet it’s never quite clear whether they are being uttered or felt. Fragmented in the manner of collages and sound poems, they cohere on the level of mood rather than semantics.

On ‘Who Won?’ a lounge lizard smoothly utters non sequiturs on the themes of time, location, and access by password or phone number, a cross between a hotel receptionist and a would-be lover. On ‘Syzygy’, Halo sings ‘I said “Get up” / I said “Time for love”‘ in a tone that suggests the time has already passed, each figure locked in their own orbits. The later tracks on Dust seem to break out of the city into a rumbling, swooning nature, before album closer ‘Buh-bye’, a stumbling carousel, is finally overcome with a brassy sunset sheen. Dust features a stellar group of contributors, including Eli Keszler, Klein, Lafawndah, Michael Salu, Craig Clouse, and Julia Holter. It’s the sort of album you can dip into at any point, and it’s a lot of fun.

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10. Vince Staples – Big Fish Theory

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9. Jolie Holland & Samantha Parton – Wildflower Blues

Opening with a rollicking cover of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘You Are Not Needed Now’, one might expect that this is where Jolie Holland and Samantha Parton – co-founders of The Be Good Tanyas, reuniting for the first time since Holland’s 2008 album The Living and the Dead, three years after two car accidents left Parton requiring brain surgery for an aneurysm behind the left eye – will more or less end up: in something folksy and rootsy, with handsomely executed harmonies, outlined by Holland’s utterly distinctive trill, and with the occasional swagger and rock. But Holland’s solo work has always pushed at genre boundaries, never more so than on 2014’s wide and rumbling Wine Dark Sea, and any thought that this might be a down-home roots retread is dashed by the next song, the title track ‘Wildflower Blues’, a scuzzy jam firmly in the milieus of psychedelia and early-90s grunge.

There’s soul-infused R&B, jazz flourishes, gospel vocals, fuzzy 60s garage rock, laid-back rockabilly, songs that veer towards dream pop and new-age, and even an instrumental ragtime closer, on what are finely-wrought mostly original lovelorn compositions, with a cover of ‘Jocko’s Lament’ by Michael Hurley and a reworking of Bob Dylan’s ‘Minstrel Boy’ featuring new verses evoking the poets Steven ‘Jesse’ Bernstein and William Blake. The result is a record that’s deeply meditative at the same time as it’s transitory, happily informal and offhand, roving but not quite restless, surprising even on repeated listens, an effortlessly elegant and endlessly pleasant trip in the company of old friends.

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8. Jlin – Black Origami

On Black Origami Jlin pushes footwork beyond its usual locales, its roots in Chicago and its destination in face-offs at parties and clubs, on a dynamic path that encompasses world music while treating it as a ripe discovery, her honed electronics terraforming as they go. Coiling, unfurling, intimately concerned with space at the same time as it rushes headlong, there’s not a branch of music it does not touch, nor a brain centre or nerve ending. On the opener and title track, computer game blips and beeps, roving ambient swipes with an industrial sheen, and rolling rapid-fire drums somehow cohere in a song which enacts the forming of voice, all palate. ‘Enigma’ takes a Missy Elliot-esque vocal sample and layers it over skittering tabla.

Glistening wind chimes, a Hindi vocal, and synthetic birdsong provide the access points on the bright and airy ‘Kyanite’: if this is a forest, we’re constantly emerging through the canopy for a view of life from above the treetops. On ‘Holy Child’ with William Basinski, a Baltic folk sample is transformed through operatic swoops, muzzled jazz, and syncopated percussion into something balletic. Anxious polyrhythms characterise ‘Nyakinyua Rise’, the marching drums on ‘Hatshepsut’ open triumphantly before being drilled into something more dangerous and defiant, while amid the reverberating beats and slinking shakers of the eastern-infused ‘Calcination’, the short track remains resolutely choral. ‘1%’ with Holly Herndon samples Resident Evil, more apprehensive than frightened, with a segue just before the midpoint into something lovely and watery. The youthful exuberance of ‘Never Created, Never Destroyed’ proves a late highlight.

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7. JFDR – Brazil

The debut solo album by Jófríður Ákadóttir – already well established in her home of Iceland and beyond thanks to her work as the frontwoman of Samaris and Pascal Pinon – offers an uncanny juxtaposition of elements. Guitar and piano loops remain tautly elegant even as they are doused in feedback, even as they unfold with a simple and carefree gait. Percussion shifts moment to moment from the granular to the monolithic, sandy and scuzzy and bold and brash. Synths reverberate and then are briefly suspended in air, loping and lulling and eternally washing. The sound palette broken down to its component parts is a fusion of sixties folk and garage rock, some of the droning sensibilities of John Cale-era Velvet Underground, and new age music, yet the invocation here is utterly modern and distinctly fresh.

In the midst are Jófríður’s vocals, sometimes swirling in the mix, other times impressing themselves more steadily, a sort of choral spoken word. The lyrics straddle uniquely the personal and the mythological, nowhere better than on the album-opener and standout track ‘White Sun’. A road trip, even a single journey conjures a mini-history of Iceland, natural and mythic, terns and other seabirds, the nighttime sun, and the ‘intense wonders’ of the island giving way to a vision of shared destiny, as a breakup song seamlessly attains the communal.

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6. Zola Jesus – Okovi

A dense forest suddenly permeated with shafts of light, the subject matter of Zola Jesus’ fifth album Okovi – death, drowning, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, the specifics coalescing as an attack on the body to be resisted at all costs – might sound dark and depleting, but this is music infused with measure and balance, a sense of space and steady hope. ‘Doma’ is a rebirth, the first sight of a clearing, its lyrical chants and repetitions recalling Zola Jesus’ breakthrough Stridulum, but instead of menacing drums and driving synths, an industrial clash and clamour, we are out in the stillness of nature, awestruck and enveloped by a choral piece.

Those pummelling percussive beats do make their presence felt on ‘Exhumed’, along with jagged strings and a lyric in counterpoint, which is a plaintive entreaty against being submerged by grief perversely framed as the act of swallowing one’s tongue. ‘Soak’ is written from the perspective of a serial killer’s victim, who wrests back control by choosing to die, an allegory for the entire record. ‘Ash to Bone’ features lovely loping, diving, swallowing strings as Danilova’s vocals soar above and the chaotic hum of percussion and bass bubble underneath, a more oblique sort of hymnal. ‘Witness’ – the first of two songs about a close friend’s suicide attempts – interpolates Max Richter’s ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ on cello, viola, violin, and double bass, boasting some of Danilova’s most affecting vocals.

‘Veka’ emerges gradually, through abstract ambient rustle and stretched, pitch-shifted shunts of Russian poetry, into a hypnotic piece on the theme of legacy, a temporal change of tack, before the club breakout at the close, the dance floor and flickering lights a fitting destination and climax. ‘Wiseblood’ keeps time, ‘Remains’ gives in to the swirl and pace of life, and ‘Half Life’, the elegant and optimistic instrumental closer, embodies a rebuilding of the edifices of life and self. ‘Okovi’ is an old Slavic word meaning ‘shackles’, but here Zola Jesus still finds room to stretch and breathe.

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5. Mount Eerie – A Crow Looked at Me

Working as The Microphones then as Mount Eerie, Phil Elverum’s music – often viewed as if from a shallow ridge, at a slight remove and in brief retrospect – has always sought to both embrace the elevate the moment. Imbued with rumbling organic sounds which belie their sparse instrumentation, his songs demonstrate a keen sense of place and an acutely sensitive, poetic, yet still decidedly modern sensibility. On recent albums Wind’s Poem, Clear Moon, Ocean Roar, and Sauna, his fragile but present voice has been increasingly encompassed by an unsettling, always alert ambience bridging the gap between lo-fi folk and the experimental outreaches of drone music and black metal.

How to square presence, a keen sense of place, and music of profound intimacy – with an atmosphere that now teeters on the verge of existential dread, salvaged by the through-line of the embrace of nature – with the stark fact of the loss of your partner? How to inhabit those domestic spaces which through the devastation of absence still imply the life, the shape, the fading warmth of another? After Geneviève Castrée, a cartoonist, illustrator, and musician, died of pancreatic cancer in the summer of 2016, her husband Phil Elverum began writing and recording songs in her room in an attempt to document the experience while providing some sort of testament.

The result at once coheres with the rest of Mount Eerie’s catalogue and stands utterly apart from the body of recorded music, an extended, harrowing, private, often overwhelming, mustering, still graceful look at death and grief. Pared back to acoustic guitar and the drip-drop of minimal percussion, bearing dates and grim specifics and symbols that double as spectres, devoid of possible interpretation but still passionately felt, A Crow Looked at Me ruins – for those of us who just have to bear its duration – the notion of music as escapism, baring the boundaries between imagination, empathy, and experience itself. Listen to ‘Real Death’, and how coping mechanisms, efforts to record and compute death, swoon and plummet in the face of death, in the modulation of Elverum’s voice in the long-flowing final verse, fond and desperate and clawing. Love and death: both are real and both enduring.

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4. Kelela – Take Me Apart

The process and the narrative of Take Me Apart – Kelela’s studio debut after the acclaimed Cut 4 Me mixtape and Hallucinogen EP – begins with ‘Frontline’, which might sound like an apt title for an album opener, but the track itself finds Kelela putting her back foot first. Its late-night synth throbs segue into a tale of breakup and defiance, Kelela’s voice besieging her about-to-be ex lover from all angles before the click of heels and the shuffle of gravel signal her walking out the door, two bleeps and she’s in the driver’s seat, moving off for someplace else. It’s a conjuring trick she pulls off again and again throughout Take Me Apart, her layered, shifting vocals buttressed by pristine synthesizers and whirring percussion, creating senses of place utterly tangible in their dimensions and for their feelings and atmospheres even while the specifics remain abstract.

The breakup inevitably doesn’t take, and we pass through chance street encounters and passionate nighttime soirees to the lull and steady acceptance of ‘Jupiter’ and ‘Better’, before ‘LMK’ – one of the sharpest and sultriest and club-friendliest tracks of the summer – provides a reset, strident steps towards new romance. Amid the dripping sensuality of ‘S.O.S.’ Kelela takes full command of all the body’s pleasure centres; a burgeoning, burnishing openness characterises ‘Blue Light’; ‘Onanon’ bristles and bubbles with conflict; and after Kelela sings ‘All the light you keep brings out the darkness in me’ on ‘Turn to Dust’, screeches by turns mechanistic and animalistic figure vulnerability and give way to elegant perseverance on ‘Bluff’. ‘Altedena’ then is no mere sendoff, a message to a loved one which doubles as a message to the self, graceful and pared back and broadening in scope with each shuffle and sigh to encompass patience, striving, and hope.

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3. Lorde – Melodrama

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2. SZA – Ctrl

Bleeding at the borders of conventional and alternative R&B, with a sonic palette that incorporates elements of soul, jazz, trap, trip hop, disco, chillwave, indie and more, over laid-back guitars and languid, squelching, sometimes tropical beats, on Ctrl SZA takes centre stage. There is a huskiness to her voice which both claims and portends intimacy, which can alternate seamlessly with a snapping conversational high pitch; and yet at moments, usually unexpected, the husk opens and the construct gives as a sudden turn, a repetition, packed syllables or a particularly poetic line spur a vocal soar, ripe and vulnerable, as on album opener and standout track ‘Supermodel’, upon the realisation her adulterous ex was only ever a ‘temporary lover’, or amid the ascending synths of ‘Garden’ when she sings ‘I need your support’. Some of the percussion sounds ramshackle, half-formed, almost a warm-up, buttressing loosely and serving to highlight SZA’s voice, helping towards the album’s twin airs of casualness and immediacy. Sometimes the beat lags behind SZA, sometimes she lags behind the beat.

‘Prom’ juxtaposes the promise of the future, readily imagined and always almost tangible, with the gropings and limitations of sloppy romance and self-conscious youth. ‘The Weekend’ feels like the album’s emotional centre, even as SZA’s voice sounds flat, frayed, tired out. When the Azzaro pour Homme fragrance first came out in the late 70s, it advertised itself with the tagline ‘For men who love women who love men’; here on a perfumed and subtly intoxicating song about having to share, SZA inverts the formula, explaining ‘My man is my man, is your man, heard it’s her man too’, although she thinks she’s got things covered for the weekend, just about. Encapsulating the rest of Ctrl, the song is about asserting agency even where the options are imperfect and self-esteem far from its peak. On ‘Broken Clocks’ SZA struggles to free herself from a loop, as the daily grind and hard-won independence still teeter in the face of stale but comforting romance.

Ctrl itself is imperfect: Kendrick Lamar provides an awkward, energy-sapping verse on ‘Doves in the Wind’, and the second half of the record sags just a little before Isaiah Rashad swoops in on ‘Pretty Little Birds’ and ’20 Something’ provides an elegiac and forlorn guitar-strummed close, still tinged with a little perseverance and hope. But the atmosphere manages to cohere throughout, and it’s insatiable and encompassing, SZA both despondent and engaged, cozy and affectionate and aloof. It’s a bold statement about emotional fragility, late-night and swooning, anxious and frustrated, but patiently and determinedly and artistically wrought.

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1. Björk – Utopia

Teeming with life, human, animal, and man-made, organic and wind-up, with birdsong eliding the boundaries between many of the tracks, on Utopia Björk willingly and self-consciously gives herself up to an enveloping paradise. Intended as an about-turn from the ‘hell’ of Vulnicura with its austere and astringent uncoiling of heartbreak, it features all of the hallmarks of Björk’s idiosyncratic percussive production, its volcanic eruptions and spurts, sputtering beats, and gushing electronics, here in especially lush surrounds. Yet the proximity to Vulnicura and her continuing relationship with Arca – who arrived at a later stage of the previous project but here worked as Björk’s closest collaborator throughout – still affords some of the same spatial qualities, punctuated deliveries and swirling, throbbing builds.

Sonically ‘Batabid’, a ‘Pagan Poetry’ B-side, and ‘Ambergris March’, from the Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack, have been cited as touchstones, and the overall ambiance does feel closest to this period, perhaps Medúlla most of all from Björk’s full-lengths. That album eschewed strings for beats and breathy vocals with throaty or choral accompaniments, and while strings do feature on Utopia, they’re in a supportive rather than a structural role, with the focus given over to woodwind sounds and instruments, most of all the flute. At the time of Medúlla‘s release Björk described it as a political album, its ‘human spiritualism’ offering a counter to the fervid patriotism which she experienced especially in the United States following the 9/11 attacks. There’s something of that too in Utopia, at once a retreat and an act of forthright defiance.

After the eye-rubbing, arm stretching, wide awakenings of ‘Arisen My Senses’ and ‘Blissing Me’ – songs which recall and reaffirm intimacy through the possibility of intimacy – ‘The Gate’ unfurls more patiently, its barriers pushed steadily ajar allowing beads of affection to pulse through. ‘Body Memory’, a centrepiece and the album’s longest track, amid squelching percussion and choral backing figures a reunion with nature, which for Björk is always biological and molecular, breathing in familiar air and tramping with the same bend of arch underfoot. ‘Features Creatures’ is about creature comforts, the most fundamental of which is the cherished form of the one we love. And there’s a nice segue, led by flutes, between ‘Body Memory’, ‘Features Creatures’, and the more club-oriented ‘Courtship’, an ebullient take on forestalled and one-time intercourse.

‘Losss’, laid on thick with beats by Rabit and Arca, subtly yet tangibly shifts the pace. A turbulent track, it offers not a lament but an act of recognition, based on the realisation that we must fight to redefine ourselves in the face of lost love. The sibilance of the extra ‘s’ in the song’s title here conjures not nature but the spluttering of machinery, firing and clanking and hammering in an effort to rebuild. For its sound palette, its candour and vehemence, ‘Losss’ and the following track ‘Sue Me’ approach Homogenic-era ‘Pluto’; with limpid lucidity ‘Tabula Rasa’ elaborates on a theme, Björk striving for a ‘Clean plate: Not repeating the fuck-ups of the fathers’. The closing tracks of Utopia are similarly optimistic and egalitarian and watery in the best sense. ‘Paradisia’ is a sunny instrumental which brings birdsong and flute to the fore, ‘Saint’ a personification of music with overlapping, undulating vocals which pays tribute to music’s indiscriminatory healing powers, and ‘Future Forever’ – a spare closer interpolating ‘All Is Full of Love’ – requests ‘Imagine a future and be in it’, a message of hope amid twinkling and glistening, diving and surfacing synths.

Utopia features some of Björk’s most involved, coiling and charming lyrics, for instance on ‘Blissing Me’, which opens ‘All of my mouth was kissing him / Now into the air I am missing him’ and later ‘The interior of these melodies / Is perhaps where we are meant to be / Our physical union a fantasy / I just fell in love with a song’. It’s an album that encompasses, that bends and gives, and that grows with every listener and every listen.