My Favorite Albums of 2024, part 2
*Not* a "best of" list!
Welcome to part 2 of our roundup of favorite albums released over the past year—our second of three dozen records. You can find part 1 here. You will find music here to suit many tastes and moods. I can’t guarantee that you will enjoy all of the selections, but they are all worth hearing. You will not find many huge hits on this list, because even though I quite like some music by the likes of Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé, they do not need my support. Hopefully, by perusing these records, you will find something that you wouldn’t have heard otherwise and that may even become part of your personal canon.
There will be one more installment to follow in a couple of days, and then a bonus post after Christmas with another dozen honorable mentions and my final choice(s) for album(s) of the year.
Sierra Ferrell: Trail of Flowers
My former graduate student and current friend
recommended this record to me. Kat is a superb musician herself, and so her suggestions carry a great deal of weight (pun totally unintentional, even thought I’m leaving it there)—and this one does not disappoint. Indeed, it’s one of the most convincing country albums I’ve heard in years. Most of the tropes of the genre are there, but without falling into cliché or predicability. For example, the lonely road makes an appearance on the first track, but alongside the idea that “American Dreaming” becomes a means of avoiding one’s confrontation with loss:I'd take better care of myself,
I'd stop drinkin' from the bottom shelf,
But my old wheels keep spinnin' and I cannot make them stop,
I've been American dreaming.
There is some tremendous musicianship on display as well as great songwriting. Take, for instance, the blazing fiddle playing on “Fox Hunt.” (By the way, you should read Kat’s fascinating analysis of this tune in connection to the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.) And there is a fine variety of musical modes here as well, as the change in mood in the song “Chitlin’ Cookin’ Time in Cheatham County” demonstrates, a tune that borrows its dark, minor-key blues from the classic “St. James Infirmary.”
Nubya Garcia: Odyssey
English saxophonist and composer Nubya Garcia has been making waves in the context of the fertile London Jazz scene in recent years. Her music creates a space where traditional post-bop vocabulary meets electronics, modern production techniques, and tasteful orchestration—with nods to reggae and hip-hop influences. For all of that, the band is tight, with great soloing chops, and we get some enlivening guest appearances from Esperanza Spalding, Richie, and Georgia Anne Muldrow. The whole album is fresh and invigorating. In particular, there is some powerful reggae fusion and spoken-word flow on the final track, “Triumphance.”
David Gilmour: Luck and Strange
I have always viewed David Gilmour’s role in Pink Floyd as a McCartney to Roger Waters’ Lennon, bringing the sweetness, melodic lyricism, and musical open space to balance his colleague’s anger and acerbic wit. But we don’t miss Waters at all on this record, because Gilmour’s collaboration with his wife Polly Samson as primary lyricist brings the record a meditative eloquence. The result is, to my ears, better than anything that either Gilmour or Waters has done since the latter left Pink Floyd after The Final Cut in 1983. Indeed, this is an album to celebrate.
By my estimation, Gilmour is the finest of all rock guitar soloists, and his playing has never sounded more fluid or expressive. He’s in fine voice too, as is his daughter Romany, who provides lead vocals on one track. Most poignant is the presence of the late Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright. Gilmour captured on tape one of their final sessions, shortly before Wright’s death in 2008, out of which he built a song, the title track “Luck and Strange.” Here is a compelling mini-documentary on the making of the record:
Charles Goold: Triptych Lespri
The New-York based drummer Charles Goold is incapable of making a bad record. The opening track, "Ti Roro's Yanvalou" sets impossibly high expectations, with its Caribbean polyrhythms and Judette Elliston's lovely vocal. It is, however, unlike anything else on the record, which resolves to more or less straight-ahead jazz, with some occasional forays into Haitian percussion. But that's not a bad thing. The album never stops swinging, with Juan Diego Villalobos on the vibes and Davis Whitfield on the piano breaking into fabulous extended solos.
In These Trees and Tartie: The Quiver
In These Trees is the musical project of longtime DJ Binnie Klein (the sister of the wonderful Susan Bordo), and for this initial album she is joined by singer-songwriter Tartie. The combination of Tartie's dream-pop melodic sensibilities with Klein's sensitive lyricism makes for an intimate, atmospheric listen. The blurb for the record on Bandcamp describes the project like this:
The album is akin to a book of ten linked short stories, and explores memory, love, heartbreak, ecological grief, and hope. The music is by turns mystical, emotional, and uplifting; creating elegant soundscapes of piano and strings that nestle intriguing melodies, achingly expressive vocals, and lyrical guitar work.
This seems right to me. The blurb goes on to compare the album to work by Kate Bush and London Grammar, both of which are apt; I would add that I'm sometimes reminded of the piano-driven singer-songwriter mode of Tori Amos. The pervading tone is a kind of expansive melancholy that avoids navel-gazing through its connection between personal sorrow and ecology: "Came back next spring / Stripped the branches clean / Earth there for you to devour and protect / You come off gentle, wind up mean."
While the record stays fairly quiet, the rhythm section is finally unleashed in the seventh track, "One Through Ten," to powerful effect, which is magnified by the pervasive musical restraint to this point. Other highlights include the opening song, "Orchard," the title track ("Quiver"), “Meet Me on the Mountain Top,” and the uplifting closer, "Shapes of the Things to Come."
Dawda Jobarteh and Stefan Pasborg: Live in Turku (April)
The kora is a West-African instrument that looks sort of like an inverted, gourd-bodied banjo that has been badly drawn by AI. When well played, however, the 21-stringed instrument is remarkably versatile and can achieve a marvelous range of effects. Gambian kora-player Dawda Jobarteh is a master, and here he teams up with Jazz drummer Stefan Pasborg for an invigorating live set. It sounds like nothing else you will hear this year, but you will want to spin it over and over.
The Last Dinner Party: Prelude to Ecstasy
This London-based band’s debut record brings theatricality and a brilliant pop melodic sensibility, along with a healthy dose of next-wave feminism. This album debuted at number one in the UK but for whatever reason has not repeated this commercial success across the pond. As is the case with Ashe’s latest album, I can’t understand why it’s not a massive hit everywhere. I won’t say any more. Just listen.
Elisabeth Leonskaja: Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern: Piano Works
Well over a century after this music was composed, it continues to divide and sometimes to alienate audiences. While we have assimilated the painting of Picasso and Matisse into our cultural vocabulary, we still have yet to accept the musical serialism of the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. This is probably largely a residual effect of their iconoclastic attitudes, but this is unfortunate. The magnificent pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja makes a completely convincing case for the power of this music—and for its humanity.
Mahler: Symphony No. 3 (BIS)
—Osmo Vanska, Minnesota Orchestra
Vanska's Mahler cycle in Minnesota for the BIS label has received some mixed reviews; however, he concludes it here with a magnificent No. 3, the longest symphony in the standard repertoire, usually clocking in at over a hundred minutes. It takes a special performance (like Bernstein's reference recording with the New York Phil, for example) to keep this piece from dragging in spots, and Vanska pulls it off, with great playing by the Minnesotans and glorious recorded sound, in concert in 2022.
Laura Marling: Patterns in Repeat
In his review of this album, Anthony Fantano said that he was getting some big “Paul McCartney vibes” from it, and he is on the money. Singer-songwriter Laura Marling has captured the sort of intimacy and melodic gifts that we find in Sir Paul’s best solo work. Indeed, this record is so intimate that it seems that Marling is singing directly into our ears, so uncompressed and forward in the mix is the vocal track here. You won’t find any Autotune in this track-list. The songwriting is vulnerable, and the performances are totally heartfelt—as Marling sings about parenthood and relationships. If you have a heart, this is a record that will bring out the tears, in a good way.
MGMT: Loss of Life
Like Laura Marling, the American duo MGMT sports some Beatlesque melodic chops, and this album is as full of pop ear-worms as it is of lyrical introspection. As the title suggests, the record spends much of its duration contemplating mortality and the poignancy of impermanence, despite the desire for stability.
This is what the birds must have been squawking about,
Right before the dream was ending,
And maybe you'd have heard if you'd stopped fucking around,
When it was time to stop pretending
That I could change and I wouldn't be here
Oh, when did all the gods deceive me?
This is an album that has been haunting me for the last few months.
Francisco Mignone: Concertos and Concertinos
—Emmanuele Baldini, Fabio Zanon, Ovanir Buosi, Alexandre Silvério, São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, Neil Thomson, Giancarlo Guerrero
Yes, my 2024 favorites list includes the work of not one, but two twentieth-century Brazilian classical composers. You won’t find that in Rolling Stone, my friends. This album is a horn of plenty, featuring infectious and memorable concertos for violin, guitar, clarinet, and bassoon. All are wonderful, but the highlight is the Guitar Concerto, featuring the tremendous guitarist Fabio Zanon. Guitar concertos are tricky because it is difficult to get the orchestral balances right, but this one is an under-appreciated masterpiece, which deserves a place in the standard repertoire.
That’s it for the second installment. Watch this space for part 3!
Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet guitar to yours.
I am impressed by the sheer variety of genres in these lists. I thought I had eclectic taste in music but much of this is new to me.
I think Schoenberg's development of serialism was a victim of its own success. Schoenberg wanted to release music from its conventional structures. He did, and as a result, his music is like the Silence in Doctor Who, monsters immediately forgotten once one stops seeing at them, only in this case the sense involved is hearing. I studied Schoenberg and Berg alongside many other 20th century avant garde composers for a music history exam, listening to their music repeatedly lest I be required to describe it in essay format on the exam. I can remember Berg's Wozzeck a little, I cannot remember the Schoenberg I listened to - his deliberate deconstruction of music removed the little auditory hooks music has to help with recall. Two decades later, I still go back to listen again to the other avant garde composers, whose music I can recall enough to want to hear it again, but Schoenberg exists as a silent memory.
So happy to be in the company of David Gilmour, whose album "Luck and Strange," is one of my favorites, too. Thank you, John, for your appreciation of our debut CD, "The Quiver," by In These Trees and Tartie!