2017 in music: more light to fight the darkness
December 13, 2017 9:41 AM   Subscribe

Music and politics have a long history and in 2017, a new chapter in their fraught and complicated relationship burst open (related, previously) .... It was a strong year for guitar rock, the best of it coming from relatively younger bands dominated by women (related).... 2017 was also a year when much beloved artists abandoned the sounds their fans first fell in love with to try something new.... There was so much more that happened in 2017 .... but let's try to wrap our heads around some of it, or at least take some time to read year-end lists, or skip the words and listen to the music.

If you want the top-rated (or at least most-rated) albums, Album of the Year is again running an aggregation of 2017 Best Of lists, with Kendrick Lamar's DAMN. way in the lead, ahead of Lorde's Melodrama and SZA's CTRL. Then there are the individual lists, with a few picked here and sorted in order of number of top albums for each category.

National publications: Major music/media publications/sites: Country-focused lists: Genre-specific lists:
posted by filthy light thief (28 comments total) 58 users marked this as a favorite
 
I can never recall my favorites from the past year well enough, so I'll just point to my past posts with the "music" tag. Using that list to jog my memory, Great Grandpa's Plastic Cough (Bandcamp) is high on my list, and had a ton of re-play in our house, and they're great live.

Chapelier Fou's Muance (Bandcamp) is pretty and magical.

Beck's new album is fun, but probably won't be on the top of any Best Of The Year lists from me. Similarly, Siimba Liives Long's Zemenay's Gemiinii (SoundCloud) caught me hard at first, but hasn't withstood heavy replay.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:51 AM on December 13, 2017


And if you want a recap of (Western/US) music news, Wikipedia has a page titled "2017 in music", with links to other pages on country-specific news, but it's December and there are still 12 country-specific links that are red, which indicates they don't yet exist.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:56 AM on December 13, 2017


kind of related
posted by philip-random at 10:02 AM on December 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


I enjoy Said the Gramophone's list every year.
posted by sonmi at 10:09 AM on December 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


Since metal is underrepresented here, this is Decibel's end of the year list for best albums.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:12 AM on December 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


Paste Magazine
Consequence of Sound
Stereogum
Some of my personal favorites from this year are represented on these: Big Thief, (Sandy) Alex G, Waxahatchee, Girlpool. I'm sad that the one I found myself listening to the most, Allison Crutchfield's Tourist in This Town only made one list that I've seen.
posted by cottoncandybeard at 10:20 AM on December 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Well, there WOULD have been light in the darkness, but someone stole it.
posted by Samizdata at 10:24 AM on December 13, 2017


For more metal recommendations, Sputnik Music has a top 200 list for all metal, which they also divide into black metal (105 recs), death metal (137) AND melodic death metal (26), sludge metal (25), thrash metal (32), and more.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:28 AM on December 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Speaking of bandcamp, they're in the process of listing the 100 best albums of 2017.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:50 AM on December 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Just a warning, don’t listen to Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me in public as you will cry.
posted by cyphill at 10:58 AM on December 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


Polygondwanaland. If your 2017 best albums list doesn't have at least one King Gizzard on it, what's the point of it? I am slightly reassured to see that at least one of them does (Pitchfork).
posted by sfenders at 11:08 AM on December 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


The Quietus has this best of list and a bunch of other best-of lists. I never like anything they recommend except for two of my favorite albums ever (by Owen Pallett and PJ Harvey) so I have a weird relationship to their lists.
posted by Frowner at 11:12 AM on December 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Also, the nice thing about their reviews is that - to me at least - the music never, ever sounds the way they describe it.
posted by Frowner at 11:12 AM on December 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


I can't stop listening to Charly Bliss's Guppy. It just feels like the perfect pop-rock record. Good length, good lyrics, great sound.

That, Vince Staples, and Tyler, the Creator's albums were my three favorites this year. First thing of TtC's I've liked at all - blew me away with how big of a departure it was from his past work.
posted by holmesian at 11:21 AM on December 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Charlie Bliss, Guppy - Bandcamp
Tyler, the Creator, Flower Boy - Spotify
Vince Staples, Big Fish Theory - Spotify
posted by holmesian at 11:24 AM on December 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


Thanks for this. Left to my own devices, I tend to listen to stuff I already love again and again and it's really useful to have some resources to find out what I've been missing.
posted by thelonius at 11:51 AM on December 13, 2017


I can't stop listening to Charly Bliss's Guppy. It just feels like the perfect pop-rock record. Good length, good lyrics, great sound.

+1
If I had to choose a record merely based on what I listened to the most this year, it would be this one.
posted by bigendian at 11:52 AM on December 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


It was a strong year for guitar rock, the best of it coming from relatively younger bands dominated by women

Diamond Rowe is one stereotype-busting heavy guitar player I learned of this year.
posted by thelonius at 12:17 PM on December 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


Polygondwanaland yt . If your 2017 best albums list doesn't have at least one King Gizzard on it, what's the point of it? I am slightly reassured to see that at least one of them does (Pitchfork).

I feel like we almost need to count King Gizzard's 2017 album pentalogy (consisting of Flying Microtonal Banana, Murder of the Universe, Sketches of Brunswick East, and Polygondwanaland, plus one more album that has been promised on or before December 31.) as a single work of Zappa-esque "conceptual continuity". They're all worth a listen, even if they aren't all your cup of tea.
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:55 PM on December 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


There is a distressing lack of Chelsea Wolfe on all these lists. "Hiss Spun", which was released in September, is absolutely fabulous.

The Rolling Stone list has U2's latest thing at #3, and Taylor Swift at #7, which, well, okay, I guess. If that's your thing.
posted by curiousgene at 2:06 PM on December 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Great post, thanks. I love this time of year because I consider myself a rabid seeker of new music but I always find a bunch of great stuff I missed when these lists come out. Our modern era is mostly shit but we are living in a wonderful time for music. There's just so much and so much of it is amazing.

My top ten instrumental albums this year:

1. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, The Kid
2. Penguin Cafe, The Imperfect Sea
3. yMusic, First
4. Hauschka, What If
5. Marc-Andre Hamelin/Morton Feldman, For Bunita Marcus
6. Colin Stetson, All This I Do For Glory
7. Christian Scott, Diaspora
8. Clark, Death Peak
9. Four Tet, There is love in you
10. Public Service Broadcasting, Every Valley

My top ten albums with singing this year:

1.Torres, Three Futures
2. Sylvan Esso, What Now
3. Casey Dienel, Imitation of a Woman to Love
4. Perfume Genius, No Shape
5. Gordi, Reservoir
6. The National, Sleep Well Beast
7. Japandroids, Near to the Wild Heart of Life
8. Zola Jesus, Okovi
9. St. Vincent, Mass Eduction
10. Chris Thile and Brad Mehldau, Eponymous

Honorable mention to the anniversary edition of Ok Computer with a bunch of awesome B-Sides. Didn't consider it to come out this year, so didn't include it, but great album.

Not on an album but Sufan Stevens' Tonya Harding is one of my favorite songs this year.

As always I make massive Best Of lists with all my favorite songs without repeating an artist. If you use Spotify, here is a link.
posted by Lutoslawski at 3:00 PM on December 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


(correction: I meant Four Tet's New Energy
posted by Lutoslawski at 3:14 PM on December 13, 2017


My first entirely random new-to-me pick that I chose to listen to off of one these lists, Ifriqiyya Electrique's Rûwâhîne #19 on NPR's 50 Best List, is amazing.

I feel like nowadays, I'm perpetually a year behind because I wait until the end of the year and then spend the next year slowly consuming last year's best of picks.
posted by yasaman at 5:50 PM on December 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm surprised to see Lorde so high. That first (only?) single was irritating and embarrassing. I had the impression it was a pretty big disappointment after her wonderful debut. I never heard anything else from it. Then again, the only station around here I liked that also would have played her changed formats, so maybe I just missed it?
posted by GhostintheMachine at 6:13 PM on December 13, 2017


A couple of my favorites from this year:

Nathan Moody: Études I: Blue Box
Nathan Moody: Études III: Red Box

Both made on small portable Eurorack systems with a West Coast synthesis orientation. He has production notes that go into the album concept and equipment used, which as a modular synth geek with a smallish system (if not as tightly focused as these two), I found pretty fascinating.

(Études II: White Box was done entirely on a Teenage Engineering OP-1, and while it's certainly not bad, I wasn't quite as enthralled by it either musically or conceptually.)
posted by Foosnark at 4:36 AM on December 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


I feel like I've listened to more new music than I have in the past few years, when I've mostly gone for archival favorites and new releases by bands I love.

Off the top of my head and in no particular order:

Vagabon, Infinite Worlds
Japanese Breakfast, Soft Sounds from Another Planet
La Flor de Toloache, Las Caras Lindas
TORRES, Three Futures
Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Navigator
Ibeyi, Ash
Jay Som, Everybody Works
Jen Cloher, self-titled

I also liked the Steve Lacy demo, but it suffers from show-me-who-you're-friends-with-and-I'll-show-you-who-you-are syndrome.

I was impressed with Numero Group's reissues this year; Savage Young Du was a sentimental fave (RIP Grant Hart), but the Jackie Shane box was a revelation for me.

This is in addition to the big-ticket critical consensus hits of 2017 (Lorde, Kendrick, etc).

In terms of non-essentials, I enjoyed the Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett album as a stopgap. (Too many songs about songwriting.) I was also fond of Angel Olsen's outtakes LP, which I initially saw as an excuse to tour but which has some lovely song on it.
posted by pxe2000 at 12:41 PM on December 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


Another recent recommendation: Corbin's Mourn (YouTube; official link to places to buy it) -- my introduction to sadboy R&B/rap, in which I am reminded how much I love sad music. Pitchfork has an album review and summary of Spooky Black/Corbin, which also includes an overview of the album's story line:
Corbin’s new album Mourn follows a loose narrative wherein our protagonist builds a bunker for himself and his lover to wait out the apocalypse. The protagonist passes away in a plane crash before things go belly up, and his lover dies alone. If you’re looking for a silver lining in the plot, you won’t find one, but the record does have some positive attributes elsewhere. Most notably, Corbin continues to carve out his signature sound vocally, cornering the market on world-weary vocal strain as an R&B approach.
Yeah, I totally missed that storyline, but that's about as bleak as the lyrics all sound.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:05 AM on December 18, 2017


And if you're craving more weird/interesting electronic music, Bleep has a pretty good top 10. For instance, Forest Swords' Compassion (Bandcamp) on Ninja Tune made my eyes go all goggly upon first listen, as I totally wasn't expecting a soundscape piece from the Ninja crew. Not totally out of left field, but it reminded me to never underestimate Ninja Tune (and it makes me mourn the passing of Drip.fm [the new site is all about creators, more in line with the Kickstarter theme, than the old Drip.fm support for labels] ).
posted by filthy light thief at 11:11 AM on December 18, 2017


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