Best Albums of 2017: Top 10
The contributors assigned for this list, fortunately, all have vastly different music tastes.
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The contributors assigned for this list, fortunately, all have vastly different music tastes.
2017 was, in almost every way, a calendar year, that occurred.
The most consistent band working wants to move forward, even at the risk of a misstep or two. That’s not to say they haven’t changed; their past five albums, recorded with their current lineup, have each sustained a coherent, self-contained aesthetic. The incendiary explosiveness of "Jane Doe," the rotted gouging of "You Fail Me," the straight assault of "No Heroes," the knotted melodicism of "Axe to Fall," the chiseled cuts of "All We Love We Leave Behind."
Kelela is, above all, concerned with maintaining dignity within movement. In interviews, and an editorial piece published by Resident Advisor, she has been outspoken about the constraints and compromises of working as a black woman within a music industry controlled in large part by white men under late capitalism. Part of that process has been walking the line between using different influences — “I don't see my sound inherent in one type of beat,” she explained to the Fader — without compromising her blackness, and in turn without being tokenized, marginalized, extracted from.
In 2007 the New Yorker published a controversial piece by Sasha Frere-Jones titled, “A Paler Shade of White,” in which he mourned the lack of miscegenation across racial boundaries and specifically that of black musical influence into white indie rock. The piece opens with an anecdote of a performance by Arcade Fire, a band he liked.
When You See Light
The Mountain Goats, the primary musical project of singer-songwriter John Darnielle, have been plenty of things throughout the years. Working with a cast of collaborators, the most consistent for a time being a Panasonic boombox, they started out in the early 90s as an acoustic lo-fi project, releasing albums and cassettes on various small labels. The songs were as terse as they were tense, compressing moments into little sonic shells, carrying the threat of exploding at any second. At the turn of the century their sound collapsed and expanded, and when the Mountain Goats signed to 4AD they added more elements to solidify themselves as a cohesive project, working through variations on themes new and old. It’s always been Darnielle, and, as any fan will tell you, it’s always been much more.