Tag: Nilufer Yanya

Favourite “New” Music – December 2022

So, in the great tradition of starting a new year by looking back at the one just ended, I can say that 2022 sort of blew. This isn’t hindsight: I was very aware of its high degree of suckage while I was in the middle of it. It began with my wife and I both having COVID (mild and unenduring cases, thankfully, but even the weaker forms of this malevolent virus can kick your ass hard), and went down from there. We dealt with other medical challenges over the year, both personally and in others who we love, and those, at least in my own case, gave my mental health a ginormous pantsing. My work performance was well below what I expect from myself, I took suboptimal care of the aspects of my health over which I had some control, and I generally was largely unmotivated for big chunks of the calendar.

The good news is that, my health now restored, I am feeling pretty good about 2023. Yes, the world is still a cesspool and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. But you can often (not always – all piles of shit are not equal) choose to only go in up to your knees instead of to your neck. And you can choose to focus on the things that matter to you – the people you love, the relationships that sustain you, the pursuits that give you joy – instead of those that don’t. Trying to do just that is my sole resolution for the year ahead.

As always, while travelling the 365 days of the metaphysical Sodom and Gomorrah just ended, there was music. I offer below a list of new songs that sustained me with repeated plays over 2022. If any of them were hits, that will be news to me: they (mostly) came to my attention as album tracks that stood out from their neighbours. What they have in common is that they triggered a response: to dance, to smile, to grimly contemplate the contours of my existence. But, mostly, hearing them just made me happy, in that inexplicable way that our favourite art does, and that’s more than enough.

  • Arcade Fire – Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole) (The Art vs the Artist debate comes up here, of course. But Win Butler isn’t the only member of Arcade Fire, and I loved this hypnotic record.)
  • Caracara – Ohio (My favourite lyric of the year – “I remember playing your favourite song / hoping you’d hum along” – has that air of love mixed with despair that guts me every time.)
  • Charlotte Adigery & Bolis Pupul – Ceci n’est pas un cliché
  • Flo Milli featuring Rico Nasty – Payday (I don’t know if they are objectively “better” at rapping, but females are almost always a lot more fun to listen to than males.)
  • Mallrat – Teeth
  • midwxst – riddle
  • MØ – New Moon
  • Mura Masa with Leilah – prada (i like it) (Probably my favourite song of the year.)
  • My Idea – Popstar
  • Nilufer Yanya – stabilise
  • Omar Apollo – Talk 
  • Santigold – Fall First
  • Say Sue Me – Around You
  • Sobs – Burn Book
  • Spoon – Wild 
  • The Juliana Theory – Less Talk
  • The Linda Lindas – Oh!
  • The Wombats – Everything I Love is Going to Die
  • Years & Years – Starstruck
  • Young Guv – Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried

And, of course, here’s the usual roundup of my favourite albums of the past month.

  • The Cure – Seventeen Seconds (1980)
  • Lester Young – In Washington, D.C. 1956, Volume One (1980) (I still know next to nothing about jazz, but when a song like “D.B. Blues” gets you strutting around your kitchen at 6:00 a.m. like you’re Mack the Knife, you know you’ve stumbled onto something magical even if you don’t really understand it.)
  • The Jam – The Gift (1982)
  • Teenage Fanclub – Bandwagonesque (1991)
  • Yellowcard – Ocean Avenue (2003) (The title track is an all-time favourite, so the failure to play the whole album before now is inexcusable.)
  • The Cribs – The Cribs (2004)
  • Ben Kweller – Ben Kweller (2006)
  • Remington Super 60 – Go System Go (2006) 
  • Kids See Ghosts – Kids See Ghosts (2018) (Kanye is always brilliant, even on throwaway side projects, but it is really hard to play his stuff these days and not feel queasy.)
  • 100 gecs – 1000 gecs (2019) (So, so weird.)
  • Chinese Kitty – Kitty Bandz (2019) (See the comment on Flo Milli above.)
  • Wild Honey – Ruinas Futuras (2021) 
  • Sobs – Air Guitar (2022) (My new favourite band, this album just guarantees me 32 minutes of happiness.)
  • Disq – Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet (2022)
  • Cola – Deep in View (2022)
  • Billy Woods – Aethiopes (2022)
  • Alex G – God Save the Animals (2022)
  • Asake – Mr. Money with the Vibe (2022)
  • Rich Aucoin – Synthetic: Season One (2022) (Maritimers: I hope you are supporting this guy. I hadn’t heard anything from him since 2011’s “We’re All Dying to Live” (the video for “It” is a delight), but he was just off making deliciously odd records like this one.)
  • Ari Lennox – age/sex/location (2022)

There is No ”Bad” Music

There is no such thing as “bad” music. That shouldn’t be a controversial statement. I know I knock some stuff that I listen to – cough, Jethro Tull – but it doesn’t mean I think it’s bad: I just don’t get why other people think it’s good, which is not the same thing. In the end, all that matters is if the music you are listening to gives you pleasure. That enjoyment can take a lot of forms. It can be an intellectual satisfaction that comes from hearing something truly original or played masterfully, or something that stirs your emotions, or makes you dance, or takes you back to an earlier time, or that makes you chuckle. All that matters is that you like it. As long as you don’t force that onto others, then you be you. 

What I will never understand is the kind of music fan who needs to slam an artist as part of elevating their personal favourite. (This seems unique to music. Pynchon fans don’t need to slag Gaddis, Tarantino fanboys can also love Nolan flicks, etc.) J. Cole seems to bring this out in people, which is nuts – he doesn’t need help to be awesome, and saying otherwise doesn’t make it true either. Or people who feel that listening to both artists in a beef (which generally means rappers, or maybe a Gallagher brother) is a betrayal of their favourite. I choose to listen to Kanye over Drake because I think Ye is the vastly superior artist and my listening time is precious. I don’t need to say “Drake sucks” as part of that choice. (On the other hand, Kanye also seems to be something of an ass, while Aubrey is one of the most naturally likeable people in music today. The wrong guy tried to get into politics. I don’t know if he’d be good at governing, but Drake would make a fantastic candidate.)

If you want to spend your listening time blasting Ariana Grande, I respect that. I don’t understand your choice, but it is undeniably yours to make, and good for you for deciding to live on what is to my ears the aural equivalent of a diet of stale Cheetos and warm Diet Coke. Some people do fine on such a diet – and I’ve consumed my fair share of both over the years – and she might just be your prime rib, while my Elvis Costello playlist is your idea of a piece of bubblegum scraped off the underside of a desk. Everyone’s tastebuds are unique – just ask anyone who thinks cilantro tastes like soap.

All of the above is a preamble to listing – yes, a few weeks late – my favourite new music of 2021. Not the ”best” music, because its not my place to say. I rarely write about it, but I listen to a lot of new music. Usually, it’s while walking (in nicer weather, I walk around 90 minutes each Saturday and Sunday), or exercising – something about physical activity and new sounds just clicks for me. A lot of these will be unfamiliar names, but I highly recommend checking them out – you may find a few here that don’t taste soapy to you either.

Here they are – my top 20 of 2021. Bracketed comments are from Twitter after the first time I played a particular record (weather conditions and my overall mood are the key factors in whether I tweet about something or not).

  • Bad Bad Hats – Walkman
  • CHAI – WINK
  • Halsey – If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
  • Hana Vu – Public Storage
  • Hand Habits – Fun House
  • Hovvdy – True Love (“melodic indie pop, meditative whispery vocals, solid song craft”)
  • Illuminati Hotties – Let Me Do One More (“endlessly clever, musically diverse, catchy hooks”)
  • Jazmine Sullivan – Heaux Tales
  • Jenevieve – Division (“languid and kind of trippy, with bracing melodies”)
  • Jordana & TV Girl – Summer’s Over (trippy, breezy, dreamlike)
  • Jose Gonzalez – Local Valley (“gentle, contemplative, soulful”)
  • Lana Del Ray – Chemtrails over the Country Club
  • Lil Nas X – Montero
  • Lily Konigsberg – Lily We Need to Talk Now
  • Macie Stewart – Mouth Full of Glass (“guitar forward, complex and rich sounding, yet decidedly not fussy”)
  • Megan Thee Stallion – Something for Thee Hotties
  • Nilufer Yanya – Inside Out (“soulful, honest, insistent – the melodies burrow deep and don’t release you until the next track starts up”)
  • Snail Mail – Valentine
  • The War on Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore
  • Wiki – Half God (“the (mostly) slow rolling soulful light jazz/borderline ambient backing tracks can’t hide the truth in his raps”)