Oso Oso - Basking in the Glow
Triple Crown, 2019
One concern about making these Best of the Decade lists is that you often haven’t even published the Best Of list for the year in which you are writing. Most of the albums on this list have the benefit of time. They’ve had time to sink in. They’ve had time to be replayed for two-hundredth spin. Some age like wine (although some go sour). However, I feel like the antidote to that is sometimes you just know. Like, when the chorus to Basking in the Glow’s second track “The View” hit I knew it was going to be on my Favorite Albums of 2019 list. When I heard the title track. I knew it was going to be in the Top 5. When I heard “A Morning Song” I knew it was going to be hard to topple that as Song of the Year. When the album was over I knew that my Favorite Albums of 2019 list might as well just be one album, because nothing else even came close. And some years are just like that. 2019 has been a relatively weak year with some really good stuff, but it’s no 2017, and it’s definitely no 2013 (which has FOUR albums in the Top 10). There are definitely albums from 2019 I’m going to miss, but I’m not sure if there are going to be any I’m going to want to shoehorn into this list, and especially not as this high on the list. That’s because Basking in the Glow is pretty much a perfect record. It’s definitely a perfect emo-revival record that nails those big emotions and adorns them with huge hooks that you catch yourself singing days/weeks/months after they gets implanted in your brain. Of this Emo Revival, there’s only one more album on this list above Basking in the Glow. Where that album (more on that at #9) trades in typical emo capital-E emotions (loss, heartbreak, grief, etc), Basking in the Glow is full of light. What if you took a genre typically reserved for spurned lovers and made an album full of songs about being in love? What if the good times never ended and you just appreciated every second? Basking in the Glow doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but Oso Oso frontman Jade Lilitri made the rare album where every single song sticks with you.
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