2017 Albums of the Year; 50–41.

50. Low Roar — Once In a Long Long While
Alternative

Like many, I discovered Low Roar in the trailer for the upcoming game “Death Stranding”. It wasn’t independently strange, but accompanied with the visuals on that game, it took on a more dreamlike quality, a kind of What’s Going On In the Seance Room vibe. This record has a different feeling altogether, but still sends chilling reminders of how our relationships with others echo beyond the time we’ve spent with them. This could have been a simple acoustic guitar and vocalist record, but the structures of the songs seem deconstructed and spread out on open canvases, then filled with big ideas to form these beautiful sound collages. Every detail seems thoroughly considered and placed where it belongs. Staggering emotional content line this record’s hallways and it’s difficult to not get lost within them.

Check Out: Bones

49. Football, Etc. — Corner
Alternative Rock

The first notes of this record are those recognizable twinkles that tends to come with a lot of those modern emo records that have come since American Football and Cap’n Jazz (and obviously many more) have made them mainstays in that genre. But as this album steps from behind the tree, it emerges as something from a different place. A bit more fuzzy, a little bit more like those unaffected (or maximally affected?) youth who don’t care what they sound like while they’re singing, as long as they can sing about what hurt them. It’s very pretty music about the ugly things going on internally that haven’t completely formed themselves yet, the things that are still lucid and that we haven’t come to terms with. Also, this band feels like small shows and bands that load their gear in before they play and out when they’re done, weaving between the kids that are all there for the main local act. Really great.

Check Out: I Believe

48. Lana Del Rey — Lust For Life
Alternative Americana Pop

I absolutely adored Lana’s ‘Born to Die’. And the things that came between then and now have been very good, but I don’t think they ever really crested into that same ‘legendary’ feeling for me. That timeless quality. And I think she comes so close with this record, but there are elements of it that feel a bit out of her hands that make it lose a little of the luster. The way she retains that super cool vibe of classic wax records you’d find of your parents, but still manages to balance that eerily dark production is breathtaking. Her ability to blend modern pop elements into her flashbacks authentic and beautiful, but I think the boundaries are a bit too blurred when the features of her collaborators steal the mic and start to wake the dreamy atmosphere and turn it into a hip hop experiment. A$AP Rocky’s inclusion is a cool idea on paper, but I just can’t avoid the feeling of oil and vinegar there. Production-wise, I think it might be the strongest release yet. There’s such great dark experiments at work back there.

Check Out: 13 Beaches

47. Pet Symmetry — Vision
Pop-Emo

Evan Weiss has been something of a major inspiration to me in terms of always keeping the wheels turning, always keeping a project on the backburner while you’re grinding through one and keeping a positive mental attitude throughout, never letting The Work become more of an anchor than it is a reason to wake up everyday. He’s fallen into some dark light recently amidst the regularly propagating Sexual Assault/Misconduct riots that have been coming out weekly if not daily in the dreary final days of 2017. It sucks. I assume this may be one of the last things we hear from Weiss for a while, and I’m happy that it’s more of a light hearted and poppy exhibition from a trio of dudes who just want to play energetic songs more leaning on the pop-punk elements than the emo elements of his primary act, ‘Into It. Over It.’ This is undoubtedly a warm weather album that you can play loud and celebrate alongside instead of deeply contemplate decisions and scenarios. Eleven fun tracks with cool bass lines, exciting parts to sing along with and an overwhelming posi vibe.

Check Out: 50%

46. Incendiary — Thousand Mile Stare
Hardcore

These guys come out of Long Island, and I believe I’ve seen them a few times in my waning days while staying out there and checking our tours that came through. They never stood out to me, not because they were bad or anything, but mostly because I never had a lead in to them or a song that particularly caught me as “The One.” But right out of the gate, this record had a certainty to it, a ghost circling it that I simply couldn’t escape. Before I knew I liked it as a cohesive whole, I was greatly enjoying the breakdowns and overall heaviness of the songs. I shot a text with a track to a friend who shared the same passion for breakdowns and said something like, “Hey man. I think I like this. It’s heavy as hell, but might take a bit to get into.” As we shot texts back and forth about so many of the great parts, I knew that this album had found its place in my heart. The urgency and conviction of the vocalist calls to mind Zach de la Rocha at its most vitriolic and the music that carries him forth bite like the dogs of war.

Check Out: Awakening

45. Arca — Arca
Experimental… Pop?

There seems to be an enormous space that Arca is trying to fill with absence throughout this record. You can hear gigantic empty rooms with his voice sounding small and frail, bedded and padded by big production sounds, big keys and humming loops. I love the track ‘Reverie’ that stretches and winds into many different directions, distorting almost heavy guitars and static to then drape haunting and beautiful notes across it. There are songs that feel almost like spanish language ‘Twin Peaks’ interludes standing side by side with gigantic experimental tracks that remix almost exclusively the sounds of a whip, followed up by an uplifting (as uplifting as this landscape can provide, anyway) song that sounds like Sigur Ros rising from a nap in summer. You’ll go a lot of places on this record and all of it is strange and awkward, but beautiful in the way watching a newborn foal learning to walk can be. There are many bones present and the afterbirth is still glistening, but for all of its raw ugliness, there’s a creature and soul within.

Check Out: Castration

44. Big Brave — Ardor
Doom In Expanse

The darkness on display here is an endless, slow and dreary. The type that acknowledges the boundlessness of our universe, that time is a wheel without care or limit. You can lose yourself easily in the deprivation. There are 3 tracks on this record, all over ten minutes long. Many of the changes you’ll experience are movements within a whole, the monotony only broken up when you stare deeply enough to watch the blank spaces fill their own voids. There are a lot of bands and albums I’ll check out that are able to play long and pulsing notes with a menacing depth, but what sets this act apart is the small voice that operates within the crush, a glimmering light at the center of the nothing.

Check Out: Lull

43. Thunder Dreamer — Capture
Rock

Pretty and swirling lights that spin in the darkness. There’s a denseness about the backdrop on this record, something like the downward distance of the ocean. Thunder Dreamer make the blackness approachable with the way that they dress it up, though. There’s something light about it. Maybe it’s the pulses off of the guitars that stretch out like post-rock’s glimmering moments. Maybe it’s the almost marching cadence of some of the piano pieces that churn along with the drummer in the record’s biggest moments. Maybe it’s the way that the vocals embrace a sadness but are sharing it in a loud and open way. In a way this band feels without identity, nothing that separates them in any great way over many other contemporaries. But the songs collected here truly shine.

Check Out: Capture

42. Jacaszek — KWIATY
Ambient Electronic

It’s difficult to substantiate an album like this one, where there’s almost a grotesque nature throughout. With vocals that are almost indecipherable, sounds that seem lost in their own spectrum, ghosts of spectral audio that dances through the speakers, it feels like these songs came together at random. But there’s a sense of being in someone’s clouded memories from a long gone time, trying to pry open truths that have long been covered up. This isn’t music that you pull off the shelf and put on for company, but rather a study that you get entrenched in, trying to use it to build a new piece of fiction around the clues that are left. This is the voice within a ruined mansion, once beautiful and lavish but now longing for an inhabitant to share its history with.

Check Out: To Perenna

41. Portugal. The Man — Woodstock
Rock

The first few singles on this record, I honestly felt were TRASH. My heart was broken. I’d heavily toted these guys for years, since their super-weird HIGH-SCENE-ERA release, ‘Waiter: You Vultures’, all the way up to this point, while there were hills and valleys, I’d ultimately supported them a great deal. While I felt much of their genius was behind them, I could still see the enormous scope they were aiming for, and their live performance still captured their early energy in their newer stuff. I got it. But the first new track, Noise Pollution, between the strange rappiness of it, and the “Is This a Lonely Island Spoof” music video, I was waiting for the shoe to fall. Was this real? But then ‘Feel It Still’ came along, and stole my heart (along with the rest of commercial America’s). Whatever the result, positive and negative, I anxiously awaited the release day on that Friday and listened to it while in bed in the dark at 6am with earbuds in. And I kind of started to understand a lot of the new production ideas, and where they were angling a lot of their singles, and their new persona. In this phase, it wasn’t quite the band that I’d fallen in love with, but the product was still something enjoyable. I had to dig a little bit, but I found it.

Check Out: So Young