My Favorite Albums of 2021

Albums

In the intervening years since my college radio station days, I've done my best to keep up with new music despite the fact that my listening habits get more and more insular. This year, the dam finally broke and most of the new stuff I listened too was just to fill out the discographies of bands I already love. That is, when I wasn't with my wife and daughters, in which case we listened to a ton of Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Kacey Musgraves, and Lorde (which, sure it's part Stockholm Syndrome, but I'm old enough to quit lying to myself about the forlorn concept of "guilty pleasures" and that stuff needs representation here. Well, that and I wouldn't be able to cobble together a Top 10 Albums list without it). 

10. Kacey Musgraves - star-crossed 

I was a late comer to Golden Hour, but the year after it was released I can't think of an album we listened to more as a family on car trips. It felt like it was always playing, and mercifully that's one of those albums you can't really play out. Like its predecessor, Musgraves' Blood on the Tracks has too many B-sides on the album proper but the songs that work ("Justified," "Camera Roll," "Good Wife," "Breadwinner") are outstanding. It never quite hits the highs of Golden Hour but there is an unrefined rawness to this album that you don't really get from the album art and promotional material. There are flaws, sure, but this feels like an artist making an album they had to make as quickly as possible to capture the moment, and I can get behind that.

9. Billie Eilish - Happier Than Ever

This one is way too overstuffed but I appreciate that Billie and Finneas skyrocketed to success and rather than turning into the fame skid and making a soulless pop record dug further into the off-kilter pop that made them their nut. It's a good sign, and the way the title track breaks down and shifts gears and explodes into teenage anger and resentment is one of my favorite things I heard all year.  

8. Guided by Voices - It's Not Them. It Couldn't Be Them. It is Them!

When GBV reunited in 2010, well, that feeling of elation is something I've only ever felt at the birth of my children, marrying my sweetheart, and winning fantasy football championships. Jenny and I drove up to Minneapolis to see them at First Avenue on that reunion tour (I still have the Classic Lineup in the Coca-Cola font T-Shirt from that show, two (let's face it, three) sizes too small now, but I keep it around because I want to be buried in it). Their first reunion album--2012's Let's Go Eat the Factory--felt like wish-fulfillment at first, but as the years wore on and GBV released more albums than they did in their original run, it started to feel like GBV had just morphed into Bob Pollard's solo stuff. Which, to be fair, I love in spurts, but there's just way too much of it for me to keep up with (see: the fact that I had to pad my year end list with mainstream pop records). That said, the second GBV release from 2021 feels like a proper GBV record, and while I'm still gonna spend more time listening to Alien Lanes and the like, it's nice to know Bobby P can still bust out the good weirdness when he wants to. 

7. Laura Stevenson - Laura Stevenson

I feel like this one should be higher, I just didn't spend enough time with it. Used to be I had the jump on any album coming from one of my favorite artists, but now I have to stumble upon them. Stevenson's songwriting just gets more and more intense as her career rolls on and I won't be surprised if this one slots in high on my Best of the Decade list with a few dozen more listens. 

6. The Mountain Goats - Dark in Here

At the beginning of each year I start a Google Doc for this list. I usually start a sub-list of albums I'm looking forward to just so they don't fall of my radar. I also make a 10-1 list in descending order and pop "The Mountain Goats" in at #5 whether or not John Darnielle has announced a new record or not. If they've got one, it's going to end up on the list. Sometimes at the top--as was the case with 2015's Beat the Champ--but usually in the middle somewhere. Always a solid role player. Dark in Here is another one of those. A few incredible tunes to pop into my Best of the Mountain Goats playlist ("The Slow Parts of Death Metal Albums," "Mobile," "Dark in Here," "Arguing With the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review") and generally just fine listening. 

5. Matthew Milia - Keego Harbor

As Frontier Ruckus' thematically broaden from the 90s upbringing opus Eternity of Dimming (still one of my favorite records of all time), frontman Matthew Milia's solo records are digging deeper into the that nostalgia that is on my precise wavelength (i.e. The longing for the smell of a Blockbuster Video on a Friday night, or whatever). 

4. Courtney Barnett - Things Take Time, Take Time

While I didn't love Barnett's collaboration with Kurt Vile--2017's Lotta Sea Lice--his influence has clearly rubbed off on her and while the general consensus on this record has been ho-hum, I love it. Especially when it's at its most exhausted, like the standout single "Rae Street," in which Barnett sits in pandemic-induced isolation staring out her window and commenting on the mundane happenings down on the street. Feels like 2021 in a nutshell. 

3. The Hold Steady - Open Door Policy

After spending the 2010s moving away from the bar band aesthetic that made them their nut, it finally feels like the Hold Steady are getting back to basics. That's not to say they're reverting to the brashness of Separation Sunday, but it feels like they're growing. Open Door Policy feels like a new phase of the Hold Steady that incorporates everything they've done up til now, aided especially by Craig Finn's growth as a songwriter on his solo albums, each one better than the last. Things still occasionally get druggy and desperate, but things don't get as ugly as they used to for THS characters. In my favorite song on the album--"Heavy Covenant"--a weary traveler details the etiquette for scoring drugs on a business trip ("I palmed him almost 40 bucks/Then I asked about the other stuff"). Despite the shady business, there's almost something...sweet about the whole thing. A lonely person making a connection in our disconnected world. That's a key theme for The Hold Steady at this juncture in their career, and I'm here for it.  

2. Low - HEY WHAT

In an effort to hear more albums from 2021 in the 11th hour, I made a sprawling Spotify playlist full of songs from albums I missed. The process involves me putting the thing on shuffle whenever I can and seeing what grabs me. The first song that came up was "Days Like These" and it stopped me in my tracks. I've been a Low fan since college, but haven't been keeping up on their evolution since 2007's Drums and Guns (still one of my all time favorites). I knew things got weird, incorporating more electronic, drone, and experimental elements, but the thing that makes Low Low is still at the beating heart of their music. The window dressing is different--and in the case of HEY WHAT, fascinating and infinitely compelling--but the through line is as clear as ever. There's something hymnal about this record that makes every track feel like a little rapture. 

1. Bo Burnham - Inside

I always thought Bo Burnham was a hack. I didn't get his brand of musical comedy. The shtick just wasn't my thing. But then I listened to one of his episodes of Pete Holmes' "You Made it Weird" podcast and was like, "Oh." And I saw his directorial debut Eighth Grade and was like, "OH!" And then I saw his turn as the pseudo love interest in Promising Young Woman where he's pitch perfectly cast as the "Nice Guy (who is actually not so nice)" and was like, "Oh, I love this guy." So I was primed for Inside. And yet I was not primed for it to takeover my headspace in 2021. There are going to be college classes about "Pandemic Art" in 20 years, and Inside will be on the syllabus. This "comedy special" is just Burnham locked in his guest house with a bunch of instruments and film equipment. The initial impression is that he's going to create something out of nothing. It's going to be a movie about The Process. There are funny bits up front: a song about the stereotypical Instagram accounts of white women, the struggles of sexting, Jeff Bezos, etc. But when Burnham's character has a full on meltdown halfway through it casts the whole performance in a new light. What started as a comedy special has morphed into a dissection of art, comedy, and reckoning with one's career. It captures the hopeless exhaustion of living in lockdown and being forced to do that aforementioned reckoning. Wondering if the random shit he is throwing together in this room is any good and soldiering on regardless. The end result is a neurotic movie musical whose soundtrack I listened to ad nauseum because it made me feel better about everything. The songs are catchy as hell and frequently hilarious, but you get to the stripped down acoustic number "That Funny Feeling" with its gentle depiction of our current apocalypse and it's just like, goddamn. Ya got me. 

Songs