10 LPs + 5 EPs + 1 Really F*cking Big Playlist = HI54's 2020 End Of Year Wrap-Up
Outside of all the great music that was released this year, I think it would be safe to say that 2020 was kind of a pretty shitty year, as far as years go. I mean… *gestures at everything*
But I’m not gonna waste any time humming and hawing about everything that was rubbish—we all know about those things—besides, end of year music blog posts are meant to highlight a bunch of good things that not only were very much not trash, but some of the things might even be just the kind of headphone treasures you unknowingly missed out on, and now you’ll be able to carry them with you into the next year. And those kinds of wins incrementally matter.
Because, let’s be honest, our 202o problems are not just going to magically disappear once we get into 2021 (our problems aren’t calendar based, they’re systemic). But if the music next year is even half as good as the music that came out this year, I think we can all agree — especially once we all get to the bottom of this list of my favourite LPs and EPs and then my ridiculously big & excellent 400 tracks/artists playlist because 20X20=400 — we’ll at least be able to drown out all the noise of late stage capitalism crumbling all around us with a pretty comforting soundtrack.
So let’s celebrate and support the good stuff that makes the bad stuff feel a little less all-consuming. Let’s listen to some good music (and let’s hit up some of the many ‘buy’ links/buttons you’ll find throughout, as that’s the only way all this good stuff will keep getting made — because Spotify is great for discovering/sharing, but it ain’t so great for helping artists pay rent / buy food and we all need to do a better job of being mindful of that reality).
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The 10 LPs + 5 EPs That Held My Ears The Tightest IN this year of 2020:
LP #1
If I didn’t know better, someone could tell me this amazing 17-track stunner of a dusty country album from Cut Worms is a greatest hits compilation from a long forgotten artist who used to hang out and write songs with Gram Parsons. To be honest, I don’t actually know better, so maybe that is true. I mean, how could there be this many good songs on an album that isn’t a greatest hits compilation?
LP #2
As soon as I saw the cover to Saint Cloud, I had a very strong suspicion that this was going to be my favourite Waxahatchee album yet. Something about sitting on the roof of an old Ford truck in an empty field just spoke to my rural roots, and my roots were not disappointed once I pressed play. There’s a reason why you’re seeing this album near the top of A LOT of year end lists, it’s pretty special. If you haven’t already, hop in.
EP #1
For some reason, whenever I am listening to Projections I always find myself thinking about how unfair it is that Taylor Swift’s cosplay as an indie folk artist this year will net millions/billions of more streams and exposure than proper indie folk releases like the beautiful EP that Tomberlin put out this year. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the shared ‘hanging with trees’ cover art of the two releases that connects them for me, because they really don’t sound much like — but I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you were willing to follow Taylor from the poppy shopping malls to the outskirts of the woods of Folklore, keep going deeper into the indie folk forest and spend some time getting lost with this EP.
LP #3
Skyway Man has the kind of grooves that will have you unironically reintroducing words like "groovy" back into your regular vocabulary. It’s a cosmic country psychedelic folk rock mix of good time life affirming vibes that makes me want to take an acid-powered time machine back to the 70s, when spirituality felt more spiritual and living in a van wasn’t a trendy Instagram aesthetic.
LP #4
Whether rapping under the name Milo or Scallops Hotel (or in projects like Nostrum Grocers), Rory Allen Philip Ferreira aka R.A.P. Ferreira is consistently responsible for my favourite hip hop albums, year after year after year. Purple Moonlight Pages might be the best one yet, and that’s saying A LOT. Whether you want to call it Art Rap or Nerd Rap, when it comes to dropping stream-of-conscious poetry over lofi jazzy production, no one does it better. Also, I am of the age and lifestyle to really appreciate a rap song about doing laundry — real life is the real grind.
EP #2
This EP has elements that remind of artists like RRA and CYHSY and Field Report, but never in a way that feels derivative. Just little glimpses every now and again, while twisting and turning around in the headphones, hooking those parts of your ears attention that want to keep listening longer. Also, I live in a town called Kimberley, and apparently the proper term for a person who lives here is a ‘Kimberlite’. Or at least that’s what someone told me once. So there’s also that.
LP #5
I always see people making jokes about how sad they must be to be listing to Phoebe Bridgers again, but I really don’t think this album is “sad”. Maybe I just listen to other music that sounds waaaay “sadder”, but when I listen to Punisher I just hear gorgeous vocals and melodies with some of the best heart-on-sleeve real-talk-observational lyrics out there. Since when did it become “sad” to be a beautifully introspective cool soul? Anyways, this album deserves all the praise that it has received so far and more.
LP #6
Before the internet was a proper thing, I used to go to the CD store and take a chance on an album I had never heard of before based on the cover art. This was a hit or miss technique, but one of the albums that hit was Clem Snide’s ‘The Ghost of Fashion’, and ever since then I’ve had a soft spot in my ear’s heart for Eef Barzelay’s voice and songwriting — and this album is the all the best parts of all the best Clem/Eef stuff that has come before and then some. Truly beautiful.
EP #3
Put this lovely EP on in the morning and, just as the title warns, you will find yourself feeling quite melancholy. But isn’t that what mornings are meant for? Feeling a little pensive? So just pour yourself a cuppa, sit in your favourite chair and let this EP go to work while you wait for the rest of the world to wake up.
LP #7
One of my favourite LPs of the 2010s was Titus Andronicus’ Civil War concept-ish album The Monitor, and I get some similar vibes in Nana Grizol’s latest, South Somewhere Else. I guess it’s the attempt at reckoning with America’s messed up history / present day over guitars and shouting that make you want to go find a steering wheel to play drums on.
LP #8
Kacy & Clayton + Marlon Willliams was not the collaboration that I went into 2020 thinking I wanted, but now it is definitely the collaboration I am going into 2021 hoping for more of. Their voices and styles mix perfectly into a cocktail of classic country with a perfect pinch of old west haunted-ness. If heaven is real, and if they take requests up there, put this album on for my grandpa (he’s the one with the cowboy hat on, waiting for his wife to come play hearts).
EP #4
One of my favourite musical ideas going is a recording project called ‘Among Horses’, where my friends at Son Canciones put a couple of artists into a recording shack on a farm in Spain, surrounded by a bunch of horses and not much else besides a rural silence that goes well with pulling songs out of the ether, and then they get them to write and record an EP. The results are always lovely, and the the fifth edition with Karima Walker and Katy Kirby is no exception.
And I’d also like to shout-out another great project Son Canciones has been getting up to: re-releasing great albums that were lost to time / the internet, including two old favourites of mine, Julie Arsenault’s ‘The Creature That I Call Myself’ and Me And The Horse I Rode In On’s ‘Home And Other Places’. Shoutout friends doing good things!
LP #9
Ever since stumbling upon 2014’s ‘Side A / Side B’ collaboration with Buck Meek, I’ve been completely floored and mesmerized by Adrianne Lenker’s voice and songwriting. Of course, everybody and their hip uncle took notice with the amazing run that Big Thief went on last year, so the secret is definitely well and truly out by now, but goddamn can Adrianne craft beautiful music. Songs for days.
LP #10
When you see people describe this album online you will often see them mention “driving” and “summer” and “driving in the summer”. And if you press play on track 1 and let the music cruise around your head until track 8 hits the brakes, you should be able to hear for yourself why it feels like the breeze has been blowing throw your hair and you’ve got a sunburn on your left arm.
EP #5
I never really clocked how Kurt Vile has a bit of John Prine-ness to his vocal delivery until I heard him duet with John on ‘How Lucky’ (and cover Prine’s ‘Speed of the Sound of Loneliness’), and now I’m looking back at past work with Prine-coloured headphones and hearing a connection I never noticed before. Shame this EP isn’t available on Bandcamp, but in a shitty year where we lost one of the greats, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to Kurt and John trade verses and found a whole lot of comfort in it. How lucky, indeed.
Ok, so those were the 10 LPs and 5 EPs that struck the stickiest chords with me this year. I tried to embed my favourite track from each release for you to sample, but, I PROMISE, every single one of the above releases is a top to bottom great listen of quality tune after quality tune, so if any of the tracks I embedded above tickled your fancy even a little bit, go do yourself and the artists a major solid and check out the rest (maybe even use some of that money you got for Xmas and treat yo self a little — it’s been a hard year afterall, remember?).
Of course, when it comes to a music blog’s subjective list of “favourite” LPs and EPs, the reality is that nobody can actually listen to EVERY LP and EP that gets released in the year and carefully consider every listening option, so everybody’s End Of Year list is really just a list of the stuff that they actually were able to dedicate the most time with and therefore develop a strong personal connection. Which is why other people can look at someone else’s list and get upset because some of the releases that they developed a strong personal connection with will be missing.
That’s the trouble with finite lists or personal favourites — there’s always something unforgivable missing.
Which is partially why, many blog years ago, I started doing this dumb end of year idea where I would make a playlist based off of the math that happens when you multiply the current year by 20 — I guess I was finding that ‘Top 50’ or ‘Top 100’ was still leaving too many great tracks/artists on the cutting room floor, so back in 2012 when 20X12=240 tracks from 240 different artists, it seemed like I had stumbled upon a nice little solution to the good problem of there being too much good music released every year.
Well, it’s 2020 now, which means that my little EOY equation has grown and grown (by 20 every year, if you can believe it) — and even though I’ve gotten smarter & smrter about how I keep track of the music that catches my ears throughout the year (with this handy ongoing tracker playlist that gets reset to zero when the calendars change), I still end up spending the last few weeks of December having to cut 100s and 100s of tracks/artists from being included in my final big end of year playlist. Every year, it blows my mind of just how endless the amount of nice music released is.
Probably some of the omissions I’ve made will make some go “how the f*ck could So & So not be included on a playlist this f*cking big?!” — but that’s just the nature of the beast that is sharing subjective taste. For what it’s worth, my ears don’t really connect with the overly aggressive/angry or overly poppy/sugary music.
So, I highly recommend that instead of checking out this giant playlist to see who is not included and then getting upset about that, just hit the play button and start listening to see if the music that is included sounds good in your headphones. Because, if something connects within the first couple shuffles, or if you fancied a good chunk of the 15 releases recommended up above, odds are good that our eardrums bang to a similar beat, which means there are some really good odds that you are not only going to enjoy being able to throw this 24 HOURS LONG playlist on shuffle whenever you fancy tapping into a days worth of quality tunes from 2020 (think of it like a tuning into a really good radio station), but you’re also likely to make quite a few discoveries.
Because there is a shit tonne of good music in here, to the point where it is almost ridiculous.
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And now my really f*cking big ‘20X20 = 400 tracks from 400 artists’ playlist for 2020:
And since Spotify embeds only show the first 100 tracks, and 20X20=400, make sure you jump over to Spotify to listen/follow the full playlist over there. It’s worth returning to more than a few times.
And since Spotify streams tend to pay artists in penny dust, I have also recreated this ‘20X20=400 Tunes From 2020’ playlist on Buy Music Club, which means you can find easy Bandcamp links to almost everything featured (about 50 tracks from the Spotify list were not on Bandcamp, but since I had to make 100s of cuts to get my ‘songs liked this year’ down to 400, I was able to find some worthy replacements and keep the ‘listen/buy on Bandcamp’ version of the list to 400 as well).
And THAT, is that for my end of year wrap-up. I hope you find some things that feel at home in your headphones, and if you can’t find anything you like… I’m sorry to hear about your loss of hearing :)
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