Albums of the Year, 2024; Honorable Mentions
Karate — Make It Fit
The Classics
When I was first introduced to Karate, they had one of the saddest sounds I’d ever experienced. There was very little flourish. The focus was on the emotive aspects of the song, a dour expression in sound form, with less of a vision on ‘the music’ and more zoning in on the heart itself. I would say that in the nearly 30 years since that first eponymous record was released, the band’s perception of not only their band, not only their music, but music in general has grown and changed and evolved, and listening to this album behind their debut is incredibly eye opening. This is a band that seems to celebrate The Guitar as an instrument without allowing it to become some masturbatory instrument of gloss and sheen. The guitar playing serves the songs well, feeling akin to the Dire Straits and… Steely Dan(?)… in the way that they honor and create music by building it up from the neck of the guitar and bolstering the sound around it. Even so far along, while the emotional aspects of these tracks aren’t the spotlight of the effort, there’s still a very clear aspect of these tunes that feel like something, but I think it’s something that youth sort of obscures.
Check Out: Liminal
Lola Young — This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway
Working Through Something
This is a little bit of an easy listen that doesn’t really land anywhere in particular. On some levels, it reminds me of an alternate universe Arctic Monkeys if they were less focused on being a rock band, and were trying to be a crass pop act. The songs are catchy and brimming with personality and rebellion laced throughout with Young’s reedy voice that sounds like a force of nature. She doesn’t really belt out those notes that typically characterise albums that are defined by the vocals, but the tremendous power behind those vocal chords show up in other ways than volume and mass, instead exhibiting a type of gravity and command that are just as impressive. Hers is one of the most British accents I’ve ever heard (get a big spoonful in ‘Outro’), one that changes the way you hear a lyric, changes the way a word has meaning. It’s cheeky and funny and irreverent at times, until you kind of realize that this is just what she sounds like. And I kind of love it.
Check Out: Messy
Draag — Actually, the quiet is nice
Portals
This is one of those records that stands out like a faded and burnt out canvas, a bleached Polaroid. The songs seem burned into the seams of a worn t-shirt, comforting and acid stretched. I would say this feels a little bit like a spacey, lo-fi album, delicate and fizzling distortion becoming the overwhelming characteristic of most of the album. But there’s something more at play here, something driven by a modern and technological magic. It has a whimsy and a playfulness that doesn’t dip all the way into ‘chip-tune’ territory, but hazards a bit of joy in its style, like the flippant excitement of an episode of Adventure Time. In fact, the ending portion of ‘Recharge’ and the song ‘Microgravity Tank’ both have that same indescribable feeling of make believe and fantasy, a kind of sensation where the disbelief is so suspended that you can erase the boundaries and dive directly into a different kind of existence. This is a very vibes EP, but a collection that feels like there are a lot more worlds and dimensions that Draag is prepared to take us through.
Check Out: Orb weaver
Cosmic Joke — Cosmic Joke
A Bullet
This album is one that I have to be very much in the mood to listen to, an artifact of a time when more of the music I listened to was more “punk” influenced than metal or hardcore influenced. This is a fast, fun riot in the vein of Bad Religion and Pennywise, a series of songs that sound like a circle pit, of enormous ripped t-shirts and hair that spikes in large starbursts or heads that are completely shaved. It’s an album that sounds like release. It sounds like a Tony Hawk game. Such a cool throwback of a record to a time when I didn’t think much about the music I was listening to, moreso living directly in the moment that the music could find different ways to accelerate.
Check Out: Empty Nesting Doll
Ellis — no place that feels like
The Unbearable Weight of Youth
Delicate and precious, these songs from Ellis are cautiously crafted examinations and expressions of the minutiae of a life longing to be released from capture. Each of these songs seems to stay within a deliberate pocket, an entry in an aural diary, like found footage of a fuzzy confessional. The cover art portrays an empty bed in a dark bedroom set aglow by what feels like some electronic screen, a feeling that somehow feels nostalgic and familiar in an adolescent way, a mid-20s stuck-on-the-internet way, where each of these songs feels like the most important emotion one’s ever felt at that precise moment. In fact, there’s a lot of thought on the out-of-body experience of allowing someone else to experience your Feelings and your Art in the song ‘’what i know now’ wherein she mentions someone going over the words she’d written and the music she created and the way that the person refused to immerse themselves in the music, discussing their passages as cliche and both too specific and too vague. Being young and feeling things is a fairly dangerous game, and the longer you survive, the longer you stay alive, the broader the expanse is in the rearview. The option to feel regret and shame and disappointment is ever growing, but the choice to grow and to move forward and to find advantages from the places you’ve been into the places you’re going is one that can make you wildly stronger with each passing step. Linnea Siggelkow is choosing the path forward, and while reflecting back at her might be a highway of choices she’d rather have made differently, this record and all creation before it seems to be incredibly hopeful.
Check Out: forever
Albums 40–31 Being Added Tomorrow! >>
