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Tyler Clark presents: Local Mythologies writesCHIRP Radio Best of 2020: Tyler Clark
Throughout December, CHIRP Radio presents its volunteers’ top albums of 2020. Our next list is from DJ and Programming Committee member Tyler Clark.
On January 1st, I set myself a single New Year's Resolution: over the course of the year, I would listen to an average of one 2020 album a day, for a total of 366 records by the next New Year's Day. Currently, my total sits at 373. Even taking into account slight errors in counting, I did it.
Hooray.
We didn't have much to celebrate in 2020. I won't belabor that point, mainly because I don't want to reread said belaboring in years to come. Looking back on my year-end lists for CHIRP since 2014, I've spent most of every introductory essay doom-and-glooming my way to a justification for putting so much thought into these half-arbitrary and wholly changeable lists, as if nodding to the "real world" might make up for all the hours spent under headphones.
Anyway, 2020 makes those years look like your best-remembered childhood birthday party, so you probably get my meaning. Music in 2020 provided a balm, a mirror, a reason to get up in the morning. It got us through quarantine and helped us rage at injustice, made the loneliness seem a little less lonely and the Zoom dance parties seem a little less pathetic.
Some of the best was produced by artists living through the same lockdowns we were, at home with nothing more than a Tascam and a guitar and a few obsessive thoughts. So anyway. Here are my favorite albums of 2020, the year I listened to enough albums to kill a horse and lived to tell the tale. I hope you'll find a new favorite, too.
#1 RTJ4 by Run the Jewels (BMG)
When Run the Jewels released their fourth album in the midst of June's Black Lives Matter protests, the duo had this to say: "Fuck it, why wait. The world is infested with bullshit so here's something raw to listen to while you deal with it all." Months of creeping pandemic dread mixed with the horrifying murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor flashed over into a conflagration of reckoning whose full impact likely won't be measured for years to come. RTJ4 was the essential soundtrack of the moment, and the best album of 2020.
Favorite Track: "Walking in the Snow"
#2 Shore by Fleet Foxes (ANTI-)
Judee Sill. Arthur Russell. David Berman. On "Sunblind," early in Fleet Foxes's breathtaking fourth album Shore, Robin Pecknold's list of brilliant artists forms both a memorial for talents gone too soon and an encouragement to keep living, working, and learning while you still have the chance. It's a valuable reminder, this year especially, and the scene-setter for a record that returns to the stock-taking confessionalism of the band's sophomore album (2011's Helplessness Blues). This new one may not be as adventurous as Crack-Up or as revelatory as their self-titled debut, but it's exactly the Fleet Foxes record I needed in this moment.
Favorite Track: "Sunblind"
#3 We're New Again (A Reimagining By Makaya McCraven) by Makaya McCraven & Gil Scott-Heron (XL)
There's something about the late Gil Scott-Heron's final album (2010's I'm New Here) that just seems to call for a remix; first, Jamie xx dropped the gravel-voiced poet into garage and dubstep arrangements on 2011's We're New Here, and now Makaya McCraven recruits him for a posthumous duet with this year's We're New Again. This latest recontextualization works better than the last, chiefly because of the meetings of the generations therein; through studio magic, we're able to hear one of the most exciting jazz minds of his generation not only converse with the spirit of an elder gone too soon, but actual add depth and emotion to that elder's already-untouchable final statement.
Favorite Track: "Running"
#4 Free I.H: This Is Not The One You've Been Waiting For by Illuminati Hotties (self-released)
What happens when the record label that you're under contract with goes belly-up amidst a rash of burnt bridges and unpaid royalties? If you're Sarah Tudzin, you released a self-produced "mixtape" as part of the divorce settlement with Tiny Engines that also happens to be one of the year's best albums. Freed from the constraints and expectations of the typical album release cycle, Tudzin issues an Illuminati Hotties album more confident, self-aware, and adventurous than any release before it. It's like someone threw a Muffs cassette into a blender with some Adderall and let the resulting slurry bake on the dashboard of a hot car. This might not be the album that fans expected, which makes its inventiveness all the more thrilling.
Favorite Track: "content//bedtime"
#5 Untitled (Black Is)/Untitled (Rise) by SAULT (Forever Living Originals)
In a world without much artistic mystery, thank God for Sault. For the second year in a row, the media-averse London collective put out not one, but two of the best records of the year without so much as revealing who performed the goddamned things. Hunting down those credits would be tantalizing enough if the records were merely good; however, their experimental maelstroms of disco, R&B, and house form into what AllMusic's Andy Kellman calls "an urgent outpouring of grief, anger, affirmation, and consolation." In other words: they're more than good. They're essential.
Favorite Track: "Free"
#6 Have We Met by Destroyer (Merge)
The review that drew me to Destroyer came from 2004's Your Blues; then, Pitchfork's Matt LeMay compared the record's sound to "soundtrack for a Sega Genesis game about kittens studying post-structuralism." While Dan Bejar's sonic restlessness ensured that no two Destroyer records were ever totally comparable, the same spirits of bizarre disaffection and danger inhabits every subsequent album, including 2020's Have We Met. Here, Bejar fully assumes his rightful place as an agitated lounge singer of the damned, tossing off paranoid bon mots that would be bleak if they weren't so disarmingly weary. "The idea of the world is no good," he sighs on "Cue Synthesizer." This year, who can't get behind that?
Favorite Track: "Cue Synthesizer"
#7 SOURCE by Nubya Garcia (Concord Jazz)
For the last few years, saxophonist and composer Nubya Garcia has filled the role of secret weapon for some of the most exciting names in jazz. After making memorable appearances on records by Makaya McCraven, Moses Sumney, and Shabaka Hutchings, Garcia comes all the way into her own with SOURCE, a chameleonic record that also stands as one of 2020's most exciting debuts. Garcia makes full use of her music heritage, moving freely from London jazz to the cumbia and reggae beats of her Afro-Caribbean parents. It's a combination that Pitchfork's Andy Beta calls "[a meditation] on her humble family heritage, the continuum of jazz history, and the power of collective action in our present moment." It' also one you'll want to hear on repeat.
Favorite Track: "Before Us: In Demerara & Caura"
#8 Philadelphia by Shabason, Krgovich & Harris (Idée Fixe)
"The protagonist of Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness’s 1969 novel, World Light, gives a tearful goodbye to the grains and knots of his attic ceiling when he leaves after years spent staring up at them, bedridden." So begins the Bandcamp description of Philadelphia, the record from 2020 that feels most like the version of quarantine that I (and many people like me) actually experienced. Written before the pandemic and recorded on its cusp, the record nonetheless channels an eerily accurate picture of unmoored mundanity. Buoyed by the yachty sax of Joseph Shabason, the koan-like poetry of singer Nicholas Krgovich, and watercolor synths of Chris Harris, the record floats along in a state of serene disjointedness, where details get sharp and days run together in equal measure. Sound familiar?
Favorite Track: "I Don't See The Moon"
#9 Suite for Max Brown by Jeff Parker (International Anthem)
After getting well-earned time in the wider national spotlight via a glowing Pitchfork profile at the beginning of 2020, Chicago's International Anthem backed up their bona fides almost immediately. Released in January, Suite for Max Brown held a wire-to-wire spot in my 2020 top 10. Written in honor of Jeff Parker's mother Maxine Brown, the album doesn't just act as a companion piece to 2016's The New Breed; while that record memorialized Parker's father through old-school samples and beats, Suite for Max Brown paints the most complete picture yet of Parker as a genre polymath. You'll find the chime-like guitar work that distinguished him as a member of Tortoise, sure, but you'll also find reimaginings of old jazz traditions given exploratory digital remakes, often to near-transcendent results. Start with "Gnarciss,” a half-organic, half-glitched take on Joe Henderson’s 1976 composition “Black Narcissus,” then explore from there.
Favorite Track: "Gnarciss"
#10 Songs for Pierre Chuvin by The Mountain Goats (Merge)
John Darnielle's first boombox record in nearly two decades was one of the first big quarantine projects to see the light of day; released back in April via Bandcamp as a fundraiser for the Mountain Goats' touring crew, the cassette-only album sold through three pressings, racked up millions of streams, and (rightly or not) overshadowed the Goats' full-band release from later in the year (the excellently titled Getting Into Knives). That one was good, but this one is great; if, like me, your platonic ideal of a Mountain Goats record involved John Darnielle wailing songs about pagans into a half-busted Panasonic, then you'll understand why this felt like a security blanket in the middle of a deeply insecure spring. All hail the mysterious gap.
Favorite Track: "Until Olympius Returns"
The Rest of the Top 50
11) Caribou, Suddenly
12) The Microphones, The Microphones in 2020
13) Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
14) Hum, Inlet
15) HAIM, Women in Music, Pt. 3
16) Dehd, Flower of Devotion
17) Bartees Strange, Live Forever
18) Dezron Douglas / Brandee Younger, Force Majeure
19) Thundercat, It Is What It Is
20) Shirley Collins, Heart's Ease
21) Róisín Murphy, Róisín Machine
22) Jyoti, Mama, You Can Bet!
23) George Clanton and Nick Hexum, s/t
24) Lianne La Havas, s/t
25) Westerman, Your Hero Is Not Dead
26) Special Interest, The Passion Of
27) Anjimile, Giver Taker
28) Mary Lattimore, Silver Ladders
29) Yves Tumor, Heaven to a Tortured Mind
30) Mulatu Astatke & Black Jesus Experience, To Know Without Knowing
31) Touché Amoré, Lament
32) Ratboys, Printer's Devil
33) Waxahatchee, Saint Cloud
34) Daniel Romano, "Visions of the Higher Dream"
35) Andy Shauf, The Neon Skyline
36) Shabaka and the Ancestors, We Are Sent Here By History
37) Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher
38) Kate NV, Room for the Moon
39) Oneohtrix Point Never, Oneohtrix Point Magic
40) Drakeo the Ruler, Thank You For Using GTL
41) Perfume Genius, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
42) Megan Thee Stallion, Good News
43) No Joy, Motherhood
44) Exploding Flowers, Stumbling Blocks
45) Open Mike Eagle, Anime, Trauma and Divorce
46) Nothing, Great Dismal
47) Sen Morimoto, s/t
48) Bonny Light Horseman, s/t
49) Alan Braufman, The Fire Still Burns
50) Caldwell/Tester, Little Flower
Next entry: CHIRP Radio Best of 2020: Sarah Spencer
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