ACL 2020 ~ Top Albums

评语：【Rock, Post-Rock, Folk & Jazz】To put it bluntly: It Will Become Itself made me want to get into post-rock again. I’ve slowly and inadvertently phased it out of my listening habits, but here’s an album that made me feel like I was whatever-years old again, immersed in powerful, life-driving emotions. Mixing live, improvised recordings with studio adjustments, Whale Fall have crafted a highly-polished musical drama in which the narrative we’ve all heard time and again (crescendo – crash – crescendo) seems exciting, heavy, like everything is at stake. Its jazz noir vibes fruitfully add an innovative way to resolve those crashes in the narrative, making it unfold smoothly, cathartic in more pensive ways. The genre might be moving at a slower pace than a decade ago or so, but it is thanks to bands like Whale Fall that it still manages to surprise, after all these years. (David Murrieta Flores)

评语：【Rock, Post-Rock, Folk & Jazz】This late-season surprise won us over with its warmth and charm. The lead video for the title track (seen in our Happiest Music of the Year article) was the entry point into a set that reminded us of the best of Lemon Jelly. Aliens, prog flute, square dancing and skipping records all have nests in this tree. Born from the pandemic, this inspired pairing of talents spoke directly to the hearts of those in peril: be calm and carry on. (Richard Allen)

评语：【Rock, Post-Rock, Folk & Jazz】The unusual pairing of experimental guitarist Eric Quach (Thisquietarmy) and heavy metal drummer Michel “Away” Langevin took us by surprise at the end of a year full of both upsetting surprises and mundane expectation. The Singularity, Phase I grips the listener by the throat with slow-churning drone pieces that make Mogwai sound like adult contemporary. The monster on the cover might represent the violent crescendos of the Alpha and Beta tracks, yet it also creates an exciting sense of detached spectacle. Quach and Langevin have quickly dialed into a pummeling atmosphere that remains forgiving— fear is replaced with awe as the cymbals and feedback ascend ever-upward to heavenly intensity. We watch the city burn from our screens and feel animated. (Josh Hughes)

评语：【Rock, Post-Rock, Folk & Jazz】This is the rare album that changed categories over the course of the year; we initially had it under Electronic, but those post-rock songs kept surging forth and changing our minds. As the lowercase title indicates, this is a restive album with bouts of morning energy. (Props to the avid reader who alerted us to the fact that the title was inspired by Proust.) Dialogue snippets permeate the album, lending it a homespun charm. Released in January, the theme has more to do with winter than pandemic isolation, but those who discovered it later could relate just as well. (Richard Allen)

评语：【Rock, Post-Rock, Folk & Jazz】Black Lives Matter and the struggle against apartheid share common ground. UPRIZE! has been riding the festival circuit, waiting for its time to shine. This film score from the SPAZA collective incorporates movie dialogue with jazzy instrumentation and poignant vocals to create a quilted reflection. Meaningful, encouraging and wondrous, this score is an expulsion of joy. The people united will never be divided. (Richard Allen)

评语：【Rock, Post-Rock, Folk & Jazz】Big Other’s expansive drones and the way its instrumentation overlaps throw up not a wall but a sea of noise and sound. Like in the best of drones, the word ‘volume’ can be used to describe both its aural quality and its physical presence. When at its quietest, Big Other sounds like a deep underground cavern, the ending almost always within sight, but never actually arriving. In a sense, it is a true soundscape, its harmonies converging into the feeling of a place, of a geography drawn in tones. There’s potential to get lost in the echoes and the crevices that make it up, sometimes finding sites of grinding drone, sometimes a pocket of calm reverb. (David Murrieta Flores)

评语：【Rock, Post-Rock, Folk & Jazz】John Niekrasz and Luke Wyland first met in 2007, so it has taken this Portland duo a while to make a record together. As the result is the supremely inventive Methods Body, it’s been worth the wait, although we kind of wish they had four or five other records ripe for discovery (separately, they have sizeable discographies – this may explain the delay in working together). Propelled by Niekrasz’s polyrhythms, Wyland explores a multitude of melodies and sounds, resisting the urge to go too abstract across two side-long suites. It could sit alongside a few 70s electric jazz albums without any problem, but equally, it sounds unbelievably new as if we’re sitting in on the moment of creation. (Jeremy Bye)

评语：【Rock, Post-Rock, Folk & Jazz】Ordinarily when I hear a group cite Saharan guitar music as an influence, my reflex is to cut out the middleman, just listen to Mdou Moctar or Les Filles de Illighadad instead. But we’ve long been fans of Horse Lords’s unique brand of heady, trance-inducing, just-intoned rock music, and The Common Task may be their most accomplished work to date. Electronic music has made the exploration of intricately interlocking patterns of syncopated phrases rather commonplace, but these compositional strategies take on new life performed by a live ensemble. Horse Lords scratch the same itch for me as a group like Elektro Guzzi, evoking the dynamic potential that often gets lost in a deluge of loop pedals and solo projects, a reminder that music is essentially social. Punctuated by a healthy dose of utopian imagination, The Common Task was the joyous ode to collectivity that we needed this year. (Joseph Sannicandro)

评语：【Rock, Post-Rock, Folk & Jazz】The second entry in the Kansas guitarist’s twinkly jazz series flirts between whimsical and canonical in its melodic ramblings. It is the rare instrumental album that subverts traditional improvisation by engaging directly with the expectations of the genre. Lord and Tortoise’s Jeff Parker exchange flurried arpeggios that feel ballroom-gauzy at one moment and yet imminently combustible at the next, always with the liminal mood of the Lydian mode. Forest Standards Vol. 2 defamiliarizes the guitar as a jazz instrument, winking its way through an impressive rhythm section like an uninvited guest drinking too much wine and telling the best stories. (Josh Hughes)

评语：【Rock, Post-Rock, Folk & Jazz】Once upon a time, this chart was dominated by post-rock. That’s why it’s encouraging to see a few bands managing to keep the home fires burning. Zwartgroen is the latest in a string of incredibly powerful releases from this Dutch band, who adopts the words of Julian of Norwich, casting a net of active calm. Hefty melodies grow from thoughtful builds, rising above the chaos, approaching catharsis. It’s difficult to bear the flag of an entire genre, but this year, All Shall Be Well held that flag high. (Richard Allen)

评语：【Modern Composition】Hutchings’ work has always been steady comfort in a difficult world. Her playing is as emotive as ever, her compositions as fluid as they’ve ever been; Scattered on the Wind is the kind of dramatic development we can find comfort in. This music is not about the void of the unknown, but the fullness of the potential the unknown represents. Its melodic sway points us toward branching paths in evergreen forests, a peaceful, yet intense emotional state – the feeling that the only way is forwards, but there’s always one last peek left towards the past. (David Murrieta Flores)

评语：【Modern Composition】The Reinvention of Romance was recorded before the pandemic, but this long composition for cello-percussion duo is well-suited to quotidian attunements of the present. The cover of Reinvention depicts a pink balloon suspended upon a “Bed of Nails,” also the title of Hennies’ contribution to Amplify 2020. Whereas that short composition features a repetitive accumulation of squeaks and peeling bells, the slow unfolding of the 86-minute long Reinvention is all about dynamic that develops between a couple over an extended period of time. Not always in dialogue with each other but always in relation, the two musicians trade roles and share space with care and empathy. (Joseph Sannicandro)

评语：【Modern Composition】In the midst of global struggles for human rights, from Hong Kong protests to the George Floyd murder, this elegant suite arrived. The voice of Eleanor Roosevelt leads the listener into lovely waves of strings and multi-language readings of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We didn’t know it at the time of review, but a second, instrumental disc is included in the physical edition. On its own, the music possesses new poignancy, and invites us to listen all over again. (Richard Allen)

评语：【Modern Composition】Inspired by returning to her home town, which was once named Ithaca, after Odysseus’ island home, Madeleine Cocolas has crafted a sequence of compositions that flow from the reflective, slow-moving and thoughtful, towards up-tempo and percussive works, soaring towards a release. The arrangements are fantastic: the gradual accumulation of thick layers of static and found sound whirl around the listener’s head, drums beat propulsively, and the arpeggiating analogue synths of the 70s find a space here too. When it’s all stripped away for the solo piano of the penultimate piece the emotional punch hits deeper. (Jeremy Bye)

评语：【Modern Composition】The wordplay of the album title is an indicator of how Less Bells uses instruments – her orchestrations are bright and melodic, but they are also intense (in that Romantic way that builds up emotional energy to then let it go) and layered. The black sun of melancholia is warm and caring, its black light darting from one breath-taking view of the self to another. Loneliness is a honey-textured dream, a flash of choirs and strings that reassure: you remain. The added folk tones are sparse and used with precision, a sudden evocation of nightfall covering the entirety of the earth, a reminder that nature will offer you a welcome embrace in the end – to dust you shall return, and you will wear your self as luxury. (David Murrieta Flores)

评语：【Modern Composition】What does it mean to love the world in face of great loss? Opened Ending is an audio-visual work in which the music of Jessica Moss is set to images by the filmmaker Jem Cohen. Moss draws upon her personal relationship with Jewish music for this meditation on mourning, during a year that has upended our traditional rituals for grieving. This pandemic has been especially cruel, preventing us from visiting the sick, or even gathering to mourn the dead. Montréal and New York, the two cities I call home, have been amongst the hardest hit by this pandemic. I’ve been unable to visit my family in New York, so I found Cohen’s mundane shots of pre-pandemic life in the city particularly affecting. But in one way or another, we are all in mourning this year, and it is necessary we find ways to externalize our internal pain. Opened Ending is an invitation to find new ways to share our sadness and love, alone together. (Joseph Sannicandro)

评语：【Modern Composition】Music for Film is interesting not only because of the music itself, but also due to the self-curatorial, edit-based process of a composer turning towards his own work. The selections here, connected into a whole, show us a reflexivity not usually obvious when it comes to instrumental music: it focuses what Jacaszek considers unifying in his compositions. The themes that emerge are like a condensed guide to his various releases over the past decade: glimmers of tension in sadness; the noisy and estranged appearance of hope when immersed in the dark; the delicate, almost classical character of thinking about uncertainty. Here it is: Jacaszek at his very best. (David Murrieta Flores)

评语：【Modern Composition】As a co-founder of múm, Valtýsdóttir is responsible for some of the most influential releases in experimental electronics. On her own, she continues to surprise, moving from genre to genre with aplomb. OnEpicycle II,she honors Icelandic composers from Bjarnason to Thorvaldsdóttir, gracing their art with an elegant twist. When she sings, Kate Bush comes to mind; but when she allows the instruments to sing for her (as on most of the album), the results are sublime. (Richard Allen)

评语：【Modern Composition】Atli’s debut album coincided with his 50th birthday, which is an unusual occurrence in the music-world: by comparison, his fellow Icelander Björk released her first album at 11. Atli has a sizeable CV of scoring and orchestrating films and TV shows, having lived and worked in Hollywood for decades, but this is a personal statement. You Are Here celebrates Atli’s return home, to the town of Akureyri in 2014, with pieces that were composed looking out at the landscape – the sea, the mountains, the snow – and the music is slow, meditative, mournful even. It’s an album that takes its time, with a lifetime behind each note, a work of profound beauty. (Jeremy Bye)

评语：【Modern Composition】Brash, buoyant and brilliant, these elusive pieces make one question where the angles are. Follow the threads to see where they head; roads that seem straightforward turn out to bend. This is high drama, suited for cinema but perfect for home listening. Without the luxury of a map, one may allow the music to travel where it will, trusting that it will eventually return home, as the closing track returns to the first, reflecting its tempo while modifying its tone. (Richard Allen)

评语：【Field Recording & Soundscape】This project includes a second volume, as well as a remix edition, on top of over 500 recordings from 45 countries that can be accessed from the Cities & Memory website. The project catalogs contributions from people around the globe recording the sounds of lockdown, from quietude to sirens to singing in the rain. As an historic document, the sound map is unparalleled. One can listen from sunup to sundown and feel as if one has traveled the world in a time when doing so is prohibited. By the end, we feel part of a global community, united in crisis but also in hope.

评语：【Field Recording & Soundscape】This project includes a second volume, as well as a remix edition, on top of over 500 recordings from 45 countries that can be accessed from the Cities & Memory website. The project catalogs contributions from people around the globe recording the sounds of lockdown, from quietude to sirens to singing in the rain. As an historic document, the sound map is unparalleled. One can listen from sunup to sundown and feel as if one has traveled the world in a time when doing so is prohibited. By the end, we feel part of a global community, united in crisis but also in hope.

评语：【Field Recording & Soundscape】This project includes a second volume, as well as a remix edition, on top of over 500 recordings from 45 countries that can be accessed from the Cities & Memory website. The project catalogs contributions from people around the globe recording the sounds of lockdown, from quietude to sirens to singing in the rain. As an historic document, the sound map is unparalleled. One can listen from sunup to sundown and feel as if one has traveled the world in a time when doing so is prohibited. By the end, we feel part of a global community, united in crisis but also in hope.

评语：【Field Recording & Soundscape】Is there any such thing as a normal world anymore? While listening toBucharest Sketches,one can imagine there is. From a vivid thunderstorm to the sounds of ping pong and bicycle bells, the artist paints an aural landscape that serves as the best sort of travel brochure ~ after reading the review, one commenter expressed interest in visiting! We’re hoping that tourism returns in 2021, but with ambassadors like this, we’re thoroughly encouraged.

评语：【Field Recording & Soundscape】Before the pandemic (was there ever such a time?) there came the Australian wildfires. And just before the wildfires took over, Pablo Diserens was out walking the Australian shore, documenting regions that would soon be forever altered. This album shows that any field recording can take on new meaning at a moment’s notice, as species and environments become threatened. The ravens on this recording seem to be saying, “Nevermore.” Fortunately, the bellbirds balance the mood. The full set is an indictment of humanity as it continues to ignore the very real danger of climate change and its resulting effects.