There Is Only Emptiness Against Us

Here in January 2026, it seems indulgent and a little selfish to spend time listening to and writing about music, but we're going to do it anyway. At worst, it's a distraction, but at best it might make us think, or bring us closer to the divine and/or to each other. Hopefully it will also help get us off our asses.

Top Ten Albums of 2025

 

10. Wednesday — Bleeds

One can almost smell the Carolina summer night, with the lake and the car and the weed and the moonlight. Fuzz bass and heavy dynamic shifts add to the wooziness. I'm not sure what Karly Hartzman has against Phish, but I’ll give her a pass this one time.

9. Juan Wauters — MVD LUV

Maybe Montevideo is the only civilized place left on this earth, where people like Juan Wauters – by far the most likable character on the list this year – will greet you and ask you what’s bothering you and promise to listen to you and invite you for coffee, like a Roke wizard, gently weaving spells to protect the last sane, good place on Earthsea from the warring kings from the other islands. (Someone has been reading a lot of LeGuin lately).

8. Great Grandpa — Patience, Moonbeam

Identifiable as folk-rock, or alt-country, and I think there may be some lyrical references to farms in there somewhere, but this is more than a genre exercise. The band appear to be nice, down-to-earth folks in the “Ladybug” video, in which the bass player also appears to be 8 months pregnant.

 

7. Telethon — Suburban Electric

Fun and lively dudes from Wisconsin, who are knd of like The Hold Steady, kind of like Weezer, kind of like Nirvana, kind of like Schoolhouse Rock, and not at all afraid to break into a polka. 

 

6. Neko Case — Neon Grey Midnight Green

Everyone’s here to see the singer, but I'm fixated on John Convertino, barely visible behind the drum kit, brushes teasing and tapping and swishing and stuttering on the snare, evoking the rising snowdrifts outside the bar off I-94 and inviting you to order another round and wait out the blizzard in here, while listening more closely to what the grey-streaked redhead on the microphone has to say. 

 

5. Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover — What Of Our Nature

Acoustic guitar way down in the mix, like a cat skulking through the tall grass. There’s disapproval and some anger and generous serving of cleverness here, but over an undercurrent of hope and belief in eventual justice. Go ahead and draw comparisons to Dylan and Baez. Which reminds me: where the fuck are the protest singers in America right now? 

 

4. Richard Dawson — End Of The Middle

In which, like Odysseus, our hero returns from the epic, millennia-spanning journey of his last three albums. I heard him say in an interview that he was going for “domestic” with this album, and there are plenty of northern English homey signifiers: community gardens and under-21 matches on the telly, and many stiff yet heartfelt (i.e. northern English) human exchanges which Dawson always captures so masterfully. Yet, by the time we reach the terrifying(ly gorgeous) middle 3:4-over-4:4 bit of “The Question," in which we learn the gruesome backstory behind the decapitated apparition haunting the track’s young female protagonist, you are reminded that this is Richard Dawson, and shit is going to get crazy in an awesome and delightful way. My wife cannot stand his voice, and I can understand why, but I can’t get enough of this guy.

 

3. Car Seat Headrest — The Scholars

A few years ago, I saw CSH at a small venue in Amsterdam, and I bumped into the guitar player on the stairwell and told him I was sorry they didn’t play “Cosmic Hero,” and he said (looking mildly annoyed as he turned from the young woman he was hitting on to answer me) that yeah, they don’t really like playing the, like, longer songs live. With that exchange in mind, I’m not sure how they’re planning on touring this release, which finds Will Toledo giving broad license to his more operatic tendencies, and which includes several tracks longer than 10 minutes. I find this more inscrutable and frankly less likable than when he used to sing about drugs being better with friends and vice versa, but I can't fault his ambition, and I could spend all day listening to him harmonize with himself.  

 

2. Min Taka — I Think We Should Just Move In Together (EP) 

The best act to come out of the Netherlands since… Golden Earring? Like Olivia Rodrigo without the performative anxiety, like Lily Allen without the defensive sarcasm, like (dare I say) Tay-Tay without the baggage of being Tay-Tay. Clocks in at 19 minutes and change, including a track which is a reprise of the opener, leaving me very hungry for more. 

 

1. Black Country, New Road — Forever Howlong

A couple of years ago, Isaac Wood packed his rags and went down the hill, and the band was left a-lying still without a frontman and an essential part of their sound. Rather than calling it a day or going their separate ways, the rest of BCNR responded by turning toward one another, divvying up the vocal responsibilities among the three women, hitting the road, playing a ton of music, and releasing a live album. Nowadays what they might lack in drama and urgency they make up for with patient song evolution, voices like Sirens, and (always earning points from this listener) a surprisingly inventive and musical drummer.  

 

 

P.S. (* = recommended):

 

*Lily Allen — West End Girl

Adds to the canon of post-breakup albums with merciless autobiographical detail, while showing off her prodigious acting chops (the album title is not incidental). One wonders if fiction would have been more interesting, but I won’t deny her her catharsis. As an aside, if you’re looking for a thrilling couple of hours, pick up a copy of “2:22,” the play she was in. No spoilers here.

 

Allo Darlin’ — Bright Nights

Friendly and folksy, like a warm quilt. Nature metaphors abound.

 

Basia Bulat — Basia’s Palace

Benign pop/folk, and refreshing to hear a female vocalist eschew the typical pyrotechnics one hears on contemporary radio, because Basia Bulat sings as though she has moderate to severe asthma. 

 

*BC Camplight — A Sober Conversation

Piano, musical-ish, but smarter and less campy. Merits a few more listens.

 

*The Beths — Straight Line Was A Lie

I love this band, and I won’t deny Elizabeth Stokes her blue period, but this release made me long for some of their former energy and joy. I admit that in early 2026 I also long for some of my own former energy and joy.

 

Big Thief — Double Infinity

I should probably like this band more than I do. Sometimes the timbre of the lead singer’s voice makes all the difference.

 

*Rodney Crowell — Airline Highway

A first-ballot songwriting hall-of-famer shows us what aging gracefully looks like. The fact that I’m less familiar with his songbook than I am with, say, Steven Malkmus’s, is my fault, not his. 

 

De La Soul — Cabin In The Sky

Always nice when old friends drop by. As I get older, I talk healthier too. RIP Trugoy the Dove.

 

Drake & Partynextdoor — Some Sexy Songs 4U

Another year, another quality Drake release, but at this point we should concede that he hasn’t really progressed from high-school-level relationship psychology. “Pussy so good I should stay inside, but I had to step out with the guys” is not a line I need to hear from a soon-to-be-40-year-old.

 

Earl Sweatshirt — Live Laugh Love

Confusing and sometimes enjoyable, like middle age. 

 

*Robert Forster — Strawberries

Sometimes you don’t need to be so clever, sometimes you don’t need to smother your vocals in layers of reverb and echo, sometimes simple rhymes (floor/door, stay/day, ten/men, town/town!) and basic instrumentation work just fine. See also Rodney Crowell.

 

*Foxwarren — 2

I thought the singer’s marble-mouthed diction sounded familiar, and sure enough it’s Andy Shauf, who had an appearance on my top ten list a few years ago. Andy is not looking for any trouble, just some gentle cooing over a top-notch rhythm section and samples from old movies. There may be a theme in there worth unpacking. 

 

Ezra Furman — Goodbye Small Head

I held my breath as I pressed play, hoping this would not be a concept album about bottom surgery. I think it wasn’t? 

 

Geese — Getting Killed

Top-notch drummer and grooves tastier than a sloppy joe, undermined by a frontman who channels a caterwauling Thom Yorke. I don’t understand what the fuss is all about.

 

Gloomy June — Gloomy June

If a management consultant were to plot Gloomy June on one of those 2x2 grids that management consultants are fond of, where the y-axis represented “energy” and the x-axis represented “engaging,” this would go in the upper left quadrant. 

 

Cory Hanson — I Love People

The dude from Wand does a credible imitation of Dewey Bunnell from America. 

 

Home Is Where — Hunting Season

Just as this band is missing a relative clause in its name, so it is also missing a competent vocalist to complement the nifty guitar playing. 

 

Hot Mulligan — The Sound A Body Makes When It’s Still

Generically likable emo. I realize that I say pretty much the same thing about every emo act on this list. 

 

Jane Remover — Revengeseekerz

Yikes. Makes Danny Brown seem laid-back by comparison.

 

Jeanines — How Long Can It Last

As if Jane Wickline from SNL started a Guided By Voices tribute band. That’s too harsh: there’s nothing wrong with some jangle and some harmonies, and I imagine this crushes on the east side of the East River.

 

*Sophia Kennedy — Squeeze Me

Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome. I had no idea who this artist was, and for some reason my first listen through what kept coming to mind was The Berlin Stories. Androgynous, affirmative, club-friendly. And what do you know: this woman grew up in Germany. I would make a wry reference to Weimar here, but my wife (also German, with a keen sense of history) reminds me that we’ve already reached 1933.

 

Kerosene Heights — Blame It On The Weather

Serviceable emo. I would have loved this when I was 19-22.

 

Lady Gaga — Mayhem

At her best, she reminds us that no one does gay club anthems better. At her worst, she’s almost embarassingly derivative: a Wham! Guitar part here, a Depeche Mode synth there, and a Taylor Swift knock-off that’s so convincing you reach for the liner notes to see who wrote it. 

 

Maddie Jay — I Can Change Your Mind

Pretty. Chill.

 

Mamalarky — Hex Key

Starts encouragingly, with late-Blur woozy guitar, before pivoting to synth-heavy mushrock. May also be an anagram for the current FDA commissioner. 

 

*McKinley Dixon — Magic, Alive!

Euphoric, mile-a-minute rapping integrates well the Mahavishnu Orchestra-style backing band. We’re outside, rejoice, indeed. 

 

*McLusky — The World Is Still Here And So Are We

Welsh kings of the dynamic shift make an emphatic return

 

Jensen McRae — I Don’t Know How But They Found Me

Kind of the whole package here: great set of pipes, well-written songs with bridges as sturdy and elegant as the Zakim, flawless backing band. I wish she wouldn’t affect one of those à la mode speech impediments, but the fact that I don’t want to listen to it is my fault, not hers. 

 

Melody’s Echo Chamber — Unclouded

I listened to this at the gym one morning in Orlando, and I don’t recall much other than the super-dry drums. Still waiting for her to show up in a Louis Vuitton ad campaign.

 

Parcels — Loved

As if Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons came back as a Praise act. 

 

Hayden Pedigo — I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away

Pretty, skillful acoustic (meaning no singing) modern folk. I will have to keep this in mind if I ever start a YouTube channel about hiking.

 

Rosalía — Lux

Cool strings and synths and hints of percussion, Spanish vocals that channel something divine and terrifying. Inscrutable guest performances. Not something I’ll put on when I’m setting out a plate of cookies for company, but it’s impressive.

 

Ruby Haunt — Blinking In The Wind

Fleet Foxy, with a lead vocalist so laid back, you fear the entire operation may grind to a halt any second.

 

Saint Etienne — International

Bouncy and happy and sounding like they’re misreading the geopolitical room here in 2026. Possibly angling for a retirement gig on a cruise ship.

 

Samia — Bloodless

Sheryl Crow-esque, relatively inconsequential.

 

Saturdays At Your Place — These Things Happen

Likable emo act, not so bound to the genre that they will miss an opportunity for a shuffle beat or a handclap break.

 

Serengeti — Universe

“This is Mr. Floyd calling for Mrs. Floyd, are we reaching?…He keeps hanging up…There must be somebody else there besides your wife, sir.”

 

*Skrillex — Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Yr Not!!

The musical equivalent of scrolling TikTok, perhaps while taking amphetamines. The listener is encouraged to play the album in its entirety, which feels appropriate, as each “song” hurtles into the next with frantic, ADHD-like speed. The music itself approximates the sounds of those chariot-things in Star Wars Episode 1, and guest artists appear, evidently for the primary purpose of saying their own names into the microphone. Despite all that, there’s a self-mockery, from the album title on down, that makes this oddly likable and super-fun. 

 

Sombr — I Barely Know Her

Boy chases girl, boy loses girl, boy misses girl. All the right moves are here - vox are distorted just so, middle 8’s are sturdy – yet I can’t help but get the impression that we’re dealing with a narcissistic jerk here. Maybe it’s that line about not wanting the kid of another man to have his ex’s eyes, a line I can’t imagine, say, Juan Wauters delivering.

 

Smerz — Big City Life

Like a dance party on tranquilizers on a cruise ship on rolling seas. Girl seeks boy, but stakes are low and ambivalence reigns. “Talk to me if you want to.” Perhaps this is what the dating scene is Copenhagen is like, and why the Danes are so happy.

 

Stereolab — Instant Holograms On Metal Film 

Madame Sadier’s vox are a little too high in the mix, which makes this effort feel more like a PoliSci lecture than a night out at the club, but then again Stereolab has always been a pretty didactic project. Pairs well with the Zesinger Fitness Center at MIT.

 

*Tame Impala — Deadbeat

Has there ever been a situation where an artist leaning into parenthood has made their art better? This is nice to have on in the background, but is that where Kevin Parker really wants to be?

 

Taylor Swift — The Life Of A Showgirl

I can’t add anything useful to the conversation here. 

 

Tops — Bury The Key

Breathy lead singer, 80s pop sounds. May induce mild to moderate head bobbing.

 

Tyler, The Creator — Don’t Tap The Glass

Apart from the opening track, on which Pharrell reminds us of his chromatic mastery, nothing to see here. Liked him in Marty Supreme. 

 

Weatherday — Hornet Disaster

The band you are looking for, and I believe they are looking for, is The Hives. 

 

The Weather Station — Humanhood

Tasteful and adept, evoking Tori Amos. Unlike Tori, nothing here to grab you by the loins.

 

Wet Leg — Moisturizer

Something about this band creeps me out. The band name and the word “moist” in the album title is not helping matters.

 

*Steven Wilson — The Overview

This is ground control to Stanley Kubrick, backed by his usual band of studio wizards. RIYL: Greg Egan

 

The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die — Dreams Of Being Dust

This year’s model is lighter on the tension and heavier on the release. The screamy stuff isn’t my cup of tea, and the nihilism is turned up to 11, but they have a point that we humans are royally fucking things up, and they do what they do very very well.  

Things Will Be Fine

I spent late 2022/early 2023 performing my annual ritual of trying to cram as much new music into my head as possible, ostensibly in an effort to compile year-end best-of lists, which some of my old musician friends and I have done off and on for the past thirty or so years.  Increasingly, this exercise is probably less about grooving to the latest Taylor Swift release, and more about straining against the inevitable pull of mortality, an observation which is pretty tedious and best left unexplored.  

With that out of the way, I present to you my list of top ten albums of 2022, which features mostly kind-of-obscure artists, along with references to other mostly kind-of-obscure artists. Enjoy!

 

10. Melody’s Echo Chamber, Unfold — French neo-psychedelia, with a breathy lead singer (Melody) who evokes Dominique Durand from Ivy and who will probably be a movie star or doing Louis Vuitton ads before the year is out. Hangs out with the dudes from Tame Impala, and it sure as hell sounds like it. The album clocks in at 21 minutes, which to my aging, impatient self feels like the ideal running time.

9. Yard Act, The Overload — Funny, sharp, very British (an actual British person shared this observation, so it’s not just me making a sloppy generalization), similar in both content and deliverance to Mike Skinner. These guys also remind me a lot of Art Brut, and I suspect their career trajectory will be similarly brief and forgettable, but good fun while it lasts.

8. Elvis Costello & the Impostors, The Boy Named If —  The most Brutal Youth-sounding album since, well since Brutal Youth. If a new artist dropped something like this, we’d all be doing backflips. But because it’s EC, we don’t make so much fuss. The curse of greatness, I suppose.

 

7. The Paranoid Style, For Executive Meeting — Elizabeth Nelson writes extraordinarily erudite and insightful pieces in places like Pitchfork and The New York Times on subjects as diverse as Warren Zevon concert films and the rivalry between Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka. As someone who once fantasized about challenging Hootie and the Blowfish to a match play competition in which they would be able to scramble four balls against my one, let’s just say I fit quite snugly in her demographic.

 

6. Carly Cosgrove, See You in Chemistry — The guitar tone on this was so similar to Home Like Noplace Is There that I had to check the Internets to see if it was the same dude from The Hotelier.  It’s not, and for a moment I imagined a good-natured effects pedal exchange program among emo bands, which, ridiculous as it is, still gave me a warm feeling.  Anyhoo, emo is normally not my thing, but there’s an awful lot to like here. Wicked guitar playing. Scream-y vocals not overdone. Musical themes introduced and re-introduced in just the right places. Girl bass player. Strong ending. 

 

5. The Beths, Expert in a Dying Field — Irresistible Kiwis with talent and energy to burn. They haven’t really made a misstep on their last two efforts, so I hope they can keep this up. 

 

4. Steve Lacy, Gemini Rights — “Bad Habit” is one of the most unlikely tracks ever to grace the single-digit end of the pop charts. Two chords, dorky synth, totally undanceable, lyrics about regret; yet there it was, firmly lodged at the very top of the Billboard charts and in our brains.  The rest of the album also resists attempts at classification. Apple Music tells me this is “R&B/Soul,” and I suppose one could see a little Frank Ocean or Andre3000 in his vibe (sexually and otherwise), but then a track like “Mercury” drops, and he’s doing Tropicalia in waltz time. I should stop trying to place him into a genre and just leave him be.

3. Richard Dawson, The Ruby Cord — Newcastle’s chief troubadour completes his trilogy (with 2017’s Peasant and 2019’s 2020) covering a span of roughly 2000 years — the first set in the 5^th century in the kingdom of Bryneich, the second in present-day UK, and now this one several hundred years into the future. Guess what: things have not turned out so well. Crow-pecked corpses litter the landscape, cities are deserted, videos looping in a museum are all that remain of the life that you and I know.  Yet through the characters which Dawson so fully inhabits, he shows us that, no matter the epoch, it’s always the same stuff with us humans: love and death and cruelty and tenderness and survival. And, as intellectually juicy as the concept is, it’s Dawson’s drop-dead gorgeous melodies, and choruses that repeat until they start to resemble the movement of the oceans, that make this such pure joy. RIYL: Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors.   

 

2. Black Country, New Road, Ants from Up There — Since last year’s offering, these kids have turned down the spazz a bit, but they’ve dialed up the melodrama in the best way possible.  Isaac Wood croons/moans about leaving home and missing home and coming back home (depending on the situation, “home” may be a person, whom Wood often addresses in second person), over a well-oiled but loose-limbed ensemble. This might have topped my ballot if they had ended the album following the barn-burning “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade,” but instead they chose to plow ahead with not one but two not-so-great tracks clocking in at over 9:00 each. Maybe they were trying to emulate Illusory Walls from last year, which is easier said than done.  

 

1. Metronomy, Small World — All these albums exist for us at a particular point in time, and one of the reasons — maybe the reason — we do this every year is to give these albums and the year in which they arrived some enduring meaning beyond the ephemeral experience of living through them, and it. We realize, a little more each year, these attempts at assessing and ordering and ranking are kind of futile, but here we are. The track list for Small World — “Life and Death,” “Things Will Be Fine,” “It’s Good To Be Back” — reads like a string of headlines for the kind-of-but-not-really-post-Covid world of 2022. Sad and complicated and hopeful but still sad. Each day’s a little mystery.

 

P.S. In the 2+ months since I compiled this list, The Ruby Cord is the only thing I've listened to on anything approaching heavy rotation.  Make of that what you will.

P.P.S. Most of entry #7 refers to golf.

P.P.P.S. (*=recommended):

070 Shake, You Can’t Kill Me – Auto-croon.  Resembles early The Weeknd more closely than The Weeknd does these days.  

2nd grade, Easy Listening – Aspiring to be the GBV of jangle pop. Snotty lead singer and noise guitar in the background doesn’t match Bob Pollard’s swagger. Back to triple-A. 

*Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul, Topical Dancer – Belgian dance act with a Roisin Murphy vibe. Best and funniest closing song. 

Animal Collective, Time Skiffs – I cannot believe that any of the people who gave this album gushing reviews actually enjoyed themselves while listening to it.

*Beyonce, Renaissance – Ranges from breathless, mindless disco anthems to deep cuts where she discusses the color of her vagina and the stretch marks on her breasts. These are not the kind of moves one sees every mega-star making. 

Dayglow, People in Motion – Owl City-esque. Should be doing ads for Skittles or toothpaste, or maybe Skittles-flavored toothpaste. 

*Frontperson, Parade – Man/woman share lead vox over a bed of synths that sounds like a second-grade recorder orchestra playing Loveless.  Intriguing.

Alex G, God Save the Animals — No relation to Kenny, I assume. Alternates vocal effects and styles from Sufjan Stephens’s gentle coo to early Kanye sped up samples. I find it hard to relate to, but the drum tone is amazing.

*Kendrick Lamar, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers: I read something recently about how the purpose of art is to make us uncomfortable, and this does that. Taylour Paige and Tanna Leone make the best female guest appearances since Nicki Minaj. 

Father John Misty, Chloë and The Next 20th Century – Singer-songwriter stuff over full orchestra, brushed drums, etc. Lyrics have a tinge of darkness that makes this more interesting than it sounds. I might like this more when I’m like 65. 

Office Culture, Big Time Things – From the band name, I was expecting something literate, hyperactive, wry, maybe Vampire Weekend-y; instead it sounded like the verse to “Baby Come Back.”

Open Mike Eagle, Component System With The Auto Reverse – Name-checks an entire roster of backup NBA centers.  Deserves a re-listen.

Beth Orton, Weather Alive – I believe I’m in a demographic that’s supposed to like this, but I do not like this. The music is moody and tasteful enough; singer sounds like she has been bouncing around NA meetings for a while now. 

Pinegrove, 11:11 – An awful lot of first-person singular going on here.  Like on every single song. Was this the guy who was accused of sexual assault or something?  Heavy solipsism doesn’t help his case (e.g., “I climb inside my iridescent mind (?!)), no matter how nice the guitar tones are. 

*Aaron Raitiere, Single Wide Dreamer – High-octane country music and deft observations of the human condition in America. Blue-staters will hear the pedal steel and deny that this applies to them, and they would be mistaken. 

Saba, Few Good Things – Chicago rapper with a fondness for triplets and a desire for familial stability. Channels Kendrick and Drake on a couple of tracks, but who can blame him. 

Sloan, Steady – Straight-faced MOR rock, nothing really not to like. Kinda reminds me of David Schreiber, RIP. 

*Spoon, Lucifer On The Sofa – We always knew they could bring winning guitar and drum sounds, but Britt Daniel pulls off an impressive shift from aesthete to swaggering Texas (and seemingly born-again) rocker. Great bass playing.  

Bartees Strange, See Through You – Guitar playing that sounds like a tape loop which is kind of cool.  Sags in too many places, but like he says it’s been a hard year.

*Harry Styles, Harry’s House – what is it about Harry Styles that makes him such a likeable character in a way that, say, Charlie Puth is not? Musical inventiveness and leanness helps. Not a song on Harry’s World is too long; he knows when to trim a measure from a pre-chorus, etc. 

Sudan Archives, Natural Brown Prom Queen – Experimental R&B. Wants to have her titties out, apparently

Taylor Swift, Midnights – Who am I to give advice to Taylor Swift, but here it is: more Emily Haines, less Emily in Paris. 

Wet Leg, Wet Leg – All the rage, but I just can’t get past the ASMR vocals. Music producers: please please please stop with that.

Billy Woods, Aethiopes – closer to spoken word or slam poetry than hip hop. Bonus points for finding a rhyme for “poultice” and for name-checking DFW.

*Nilüfer Yanya, Painless – Annie Lennox fanatics and their heirs will lap this up. Great drumming.

Years and Years, Night Call – Music for the horny.  Bright and clean like a penny whistle.

*Other albums I liked but I didn’t listen to enough to say anything useful about: Belle & Sebastian, Julia Jacklin, Ezra Furman, Kiwi Jr, Big Thief

She gets it while she can

I finally got around to watching that new Beatles documentary.  I admit that, even for a Beatles nut like myself, it felt daunting: 8+ hours of them sitting around smoking and drinking tea and playing “I’ve Got a Feeling” a thousand times and fracturing under the tremendous weight of who and what they were. Did the world really need more Beatles content?

The pre-marketing of Get Back promised to “set the record straight” about the original Let It Be project.  Peter Jackson and co. would show us that their break-up really wasn’t the acrimonious, Yoko-induced feud that we’d been fed, that there was still sublime musical collaboration going on, that they hadn't lost their Liverpudlian cheekiness, that The Beatles were still The Beatles. And yes, the film checks those boxes. We feel the tension (especially when George bails for a while in Part 1), but we also see how much they loved playing music, and loved the creative process, and loved each other.

But the joy of watching Get Back is not about seeing something new. It’s about seeing everything that leads up to all the magical stuff we already know is going to happen. We know that pretty soon, Billy Preston’s going to show up and breathe life into the sessions. That George is going to stop passive-aggressively noodling around with his wah-wah pedal and come up with the sublime descending lead part during the verses of “Don’t Let Me Down.”  That Ringo’s eventually going to change his drum part on “Get Back” from a straight 4:4 to the sly gallop that propels the song. That these snippets of “Something” and “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “Carry That Weight” are going to coalesce into the miracle that is Abbey Road. 

We also know what will happen to John 11 years later.

The ostensible climax of Get Back is the rooftop concert in Part 3. It isn’t really much of a “concert:” they only play a few songs, and the people down on the street below can’t even see them, and John forgets some of the words, and his fingers are too cold to play the solos well. But they are still glorious, and people down on the street stop and look up and try to see this music that seems to come from the heavens. 

Playing amplified rock music in the middle of London is noisy, and at a certain point the cops show up. “Is this really necessary?” one of them asks, with a British politeness that is almost laughable (one suspects that the Minneapolis PD wouldn't react to a similar situation in quite the same way). He repeats the question a few times, as do the few (mainly older) people out on the street who are complaining about the noise. "Is this really necessary?"  

I wonder if any of those people are still living, and if they saw this movie and thought about the question they asked. What exactly did they think was more “necessary” than stopping what they were doing and listening to the vocal harmonies on “I Dig a Pony?” Catching the next bus? Getting home for dinner? Sleeping? Making sure the wheels of commerce continue to turn undisturbed? 

As I’ve mentioned before, it feels like it gets harder to complete my Critics Poll with each passing year. Between work and doing the dishes and amateur epidemiology, it’s not easy to keep up with what new music has come out, much less to listen to it critically and try to put a year-end list together. I can’t say that I did a great job of it this past year. I crammed most of my listening into December and January, so I’m sure I missed a lot of good stuff. But I keep doing it because all these artists will be gone one day, and so will I, and so will you. Because there are more important things than the next Zoom meeting. Because music is more than entertainment or a sound bed for an Applebee's ad. Because music and the artists who make it and the emotion and meaning it carries are, indeed, necessary. 

 Top Ten Albums of 2021

10. Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram & John Randall – The Marfa Tapes

Lo-fi country replete with tape hiss, beer cans cracking open, and what sounds like a campfire, or maybe a horse nibbling on straw. These are bona fide Country Music Stars, so you suspect that the casualness itself may be produced, but there’s no denying the songs and the performances.      

9. Tyler, the Creator – Call Me if You Get Lost

What in God’s name is Tyler, the Creator doing rapping about Geneva, Switzerland?  I suspect that he hasn’t ventured too far away from Quai Wilson, but in any case it’s refreshing to hear an American call his passport his most valuable possession.  

8. St. Lenox – Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times

Andrew Choi brings the confessional indie-pop heat. This deserves more than a one-line summary, especially given the “spiritual” leanings of this here website, but I haven’t listened to it in a while, and I don’t want to do it injustice. Trust me on this one. 

7. Juan Wauters – Real Life Situations 

Like a long Saturday afternoon ride on the 7 train; at each stop, the doors part to reveal a pure, gorgeous glimpse of life in the city.  The protagonist is a very likeable Uruguayan transplant, who breaks the 4^th wall mid-album to say he hopes we’re enjoying ourselves.

6. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – LW  

Melbourne's favorite microtonal freaks release the 7,000^th album of their career.  This was my first foray into the “Gizzverse” (eew), and I can imagine how easy it is for young impressionable types to venture in there and never find their way out. 

5. Black Country, New Road – For the First Time

Progressive Klezmer played by some uni-types from Cambridge, UK.  RIYL: Morphine, The Lounge Lizards, John Zorn. The vocalist, who does more of a basso profundo spoken-word thing, might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I dare you to sit still through this one.  

4. Espanto – Cemento

As if someone had commissioned Kraftwerk to score a Spanish-language version of Teletubbies directed by David Lynch.  No, that’s not right: the synths might feel cold and distant, but Teresa and Luis are coming with mucho joy and love and warmth here. Recalls Dead Media by Hefner, come to think of it.

3. Bad Bad Hats – Walkman

Groovy, well-structured, sympathetic female lead singer, even more sympathetic guitar tones. Aspiring pop music producers, take note: pulling out the bass guitar for the verse and then bringing it back in for the chorus is a very useful maneuver.

2. The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die – Illusory Walls

Triumphantly captures the vertiginous bridge between prog and emo. Like Muse without the stadium pretense. I think having a female vocalist helps. Drums like cannon fire. 

1. Kiwi Jr. – Cooler Returns

I find myself wanting to apologize for putting these dudes from Toronto at the top of my list. There are certainly other acts with better chops, more thematic consistency, more scrutable lyrics, (certainly) more sex appeal.  I think I compared them to Pavement last time out, and the lead singer does indeed bear a timbric resemblance to Stephen Malkmus. But these guys don’t have the same need for irony or archness. Sometimes good songs, played well with winning energy are enough. Being Canadian probably helps too.