This is a unique year-end list for me in that it is far more exhaustive than I’ve probably ever done and features only albums from the past year — no making excuses for not finding out about a prior year’s release until this year kind of hijinks. The reason for this is that I’ve really settled into a groove in terms of seeking out music that resonates with me. Most of this list is instrumental, but largely uncategorizably so. While I’m unwilling, probably even unable, to rank these, I am putting the ones that got more airplay towards the top.
Still House Plants, If I don’t make it, I love u
Simple on paper (just guitar, drums, and vocals) but so not simple in practice, this British band made an immediate impression on me for the way they eschewed all stylistic rules in favor of a sound that is equal parts challenging and chilling.
Yesness, See You at the Solipsist Convention
Post rock fun that sometimes unapologetically dips a big toe across the tracks into near-EDM euphoria, which would normally be not my thing but here it works in wondrous fashion. And it can claim the funniest album name in maybe forever.
Jeff Parker ETA IVTET, The Way Out of Easy
SML, Small Medium Large
Anna Butterss, Mighty Vertebrate
Alabaster dePlume, Cremisan: Prologue to a Blade (EP)
Tomin, A Willed and Conscious Balance
Grouping these not because they’re similar (they loosely occupy a sort of jazz-adjacent segment that I gravitate heavily towards) but because they were all released on International Anthem, which for my money is the most important label going right now. The difference between the best and the worst of these five is infinitesimal but the stand out is definitely the one at the top. Four pieces in eighty minutes of practiced improv that I can listen to all day long, over and over, without fatigue.
Kali Malone, All Life Long
Maya Beiser x Terry Riley, In C
These are albums that exist somewhere else from the rest of this list, with pipe organ, choir, brass (Malone) and hauntingly multi-tracked cello (Beiser) taking turns for your attention, often at a pace that is wakeless and serene. These are gorgeous pieces that are welcome spins when I gotta get out of a rut or want to be challenged in a different aural register.
Bill Orcutt, Four Guitars Live
Squanderers, If a Body Meet a Body
Ava Mendoza, The Circular Train
Wendy Eisenberg, Viewfinder
Shane Parish, Repertoire
David Grubbs, Your Music Encountered in a Dream
There’s a lot of overlap on these six pieces. Four Guitars Live is an eclectic electric guitar quartet featuring Bill Orcutt, Ava Mendoza, Wendy Eisenberg, and Shane Parish, while Squanderers features Eisenberg and David Grubbs, along with Bonner Kramer. David Grubbs is probably best known for being half (with Jim O’Rourke) of Gastr del Sol. (Drag City released a box set of archival stuff of theirs that made some news in the spring.) For me, what all of these artists have in common is a palpable love for their craft without a desire to sell out and compromise their artistic integrity. They do whatever the fuck they want, which is exactly the kind of musical art I want to hear.
Shellac, To All Trains
The only straight ahead rock album on this list was finished before but released shortly after singer and guitarist Steve Albini’s untimely death. This is possibly Shellac’s finest.
Horse Lords, As it Happened: Horse Lords Live
The Baltimore based quartet of saxophone/percussion, bass, guitar, and drums were unknown to me when I got wind of this release. They use the just intonation tuning system which I’d also never heard of, much less know what it means. But let me tell you, this set is energetic and comes at you at a hundred miles an hour and doesn’t let up until it hits a brick wall and shatters into a million pieces. Of applause.
Oren Ambarchi, Ghosted II
Ambarchi is a prolific Australian guitarist and percussionist who teams up here with Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin for a sequel to their 2022 album of the same name, sans the Roman numeral. Ambarchi is a gifted composer who creates music in an orbit that it alone inhabits. Slightly droney and repetitive, the listener sinks into his creations only to realize that it’s more of a journey than a meditation.
Ron Miles, Old Main Chapel (Live)
This one is purely sentimental and personal. Ron was two years older than me, grew up in Denver, graduated from Denver East HS where my daughter also graduated and my stepson goes, taught music at Metropolitan State University, and lived in the same neighborhood I’ve called home for over twenty-five years. I got to know him when he shopped fairly regularly at the neighborhood market I managed for years. In 2022 he died from a rare blood disease. He had just released his first album (his twelfth overall, the truly remarkable Rainbow Sign) for Blue Note and it finally looked like this amazing cornetist and trumpeter was about to become more well known and revered than he already was, deservedly so. This was also released on Blue Note and was recorded in 2011. Like most of his recordings it features the crazy talented guitarist Bill Frisell.
Mabe Fratti, Sentir Que No Sabes
Guatemalan born, Mexico City-based cellist and singer fuses pop elements with the less rigid experimental sounds she loves to hide in.
Tashi Dorji, we will be wherever the fires are lit
The Bhutanese experimental guitarist’s latest album has him improvising “in opposition to the towers,” as he puts it, on the acoustic guitar. Experimental and challenging as it may be, the whole thing courts and coaxes a melodic undertone that keeps the whole performance from dithering away incoherently.
Moin, You Never End
British art rock-but-not-quite-rock band Moin’s latest keeps hitting all the same nerve endings for me but this time with a grip of guest vocalists. Keep in mind, though, that no one actually really sings on a Moin record, they sort of converse.
Dialect, Atlas of Green
Experimental and ambient, this set can be relaxing, rewarding, or both.
Basic, This is Basic
Basic is guitarist Chris Forsythe and two other cats I’ve never heard of. It’s loosely based on Robert Quine and Fred Maher’s experimental 1984 album called BASIC. I love Quine’s work on Matthew Sweet’s seminal 90’s albums but am unfamiliar with he and Maher’s project in the decade prior. Whatever the inspiration, this 2024 version is a polyrhythmic blast of math rock nerdiness with some 80’s synth sounds to pay homage to the original.
Ty Segall, Love Rudiments
Known for shredding, shredding, and more shredding on the guitar, apparently his first love was the drums and percussion, so after umpteen albums where he shreds and shreds, and then shreds some more, this album features no guitar, no vocals, just drums and other sundry percussive sounds. And it’s really good.
Nala Sinephro, Endlessness
The harpist’s second album picks up right where her first left off, although sans the British new jazz heavyweights (including Nubya Garcia) with a hit-play-and-let-it-blend-into-the-corner chill vibe but know that the listener will be rewarded when training their focus directly towards it.
Meshell Ndegeocello, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin
Several years-worth of pent-up social commentary coalesce into a big beautiful masterpiece of love and anger that serenely erases the lines between jazz, r&b, spoken word, folk, and rock.
Beings, There is a Garden
Zoh Amba’s saxophone sounds like Sam Cooke’s voice — it can morph, without warning, from the sweetest thing on earth to sandpaper or a high-pitched call for mercy — while veterans Jim White, Steve Gunn, and Shahzad Ismaily gracefully and purposely nudge the wheels off their axles.
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