Pre-Season #7 - Episode of the Week
Favorite Albums of 2020 - Waxahatchee, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, Owen Pallett, Allegra Krieger, David Grubbs and Taku Unami, Wesley Wolffe, Tenci, TJO, & Still House Plants
Cold Open
Hi hello! I knew I couldn’t be trusted to count correctly. Ever since I started considering my favorite albums of the year, Saint Cloud made the list. Waxahatchee was one of my most listened to artists of 2020, often making it on my “Your Daily Drive” playlists that Spotify curates based on whatever you’ve been spinning regularly. The first song, “Oxbow,” is my favorite opener of the year.
And still somehow I forgot to include it in my initial draft of 10 albums. There was a lot of shifting around for what would be included and what would be mentioned honorably—but I damn left Waxahatchee off entirely. I have been looking forward to recommending it, however, so: here you go, #5.5 of the year.
Before we get into Saint Cloud, though, we have some excellent write-ups from two of my favorite writers, artists, and thinkers—Jacob Kupperman and Eli Winter. To you both, thank you thank you thank you for contributing to this episode. To everyone reading, get excited, because their write-ups floored me, and I hope they move you, too.
From the Community
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann on Thao & The Get Down Stay Down and Owen Pallett
This year, I got into Dungeons & Dragons. The game is all contradiction: it gives you a simple aim—tell a story with your friends—and asks you to achieve that aim through supremely complicated means. It’s all artifice. It’s tables and charts and maps of people and places that have never existed, building stories from the ground up. It’s a beautiful game in all of its drudgery. The artifice is the point; you aren’t trying to get away from it when you play, but instead find the ways to twist it and build it into something you can love, an air-tight world with all of its machinery laid out in front of you.
In the least embarrassing way possible, my two favorite albums of the year feel like incredibly well run D&D campaigns. They’re alike in many ways—long-awaited meditations on devastation and queerness—but most of all they share a stylistic aim, a focus on a sonic and thematic coherence that envelops you. They’re concept albums in the classic sense, works with internal logics that teach you how to listen to them as you do it.
Of the two albums, Temple is the more accessible. The album is singer-songwriter Thao Nguyen’s 7th release, and the 5th album she’s put out with the Get Down Stay Down. On Temple, Nguyen and primary collaborator Adam Thompson construct a hybrid of sounds, bringing together off-kilter dance rhythms and spidery post punk guitars. There’s something about the texture of the guitar on this record — it’s mixed so it sounds like bolts of divine providence, breaking from the dominant tendencies in contemporary indie towards 80s sheen, soft-focus folk, or punk brashness.
Instead, the guitars on tracks like “Phenom” or “Pure Cinema” slice through songs, never sounding quite at ease with where they land. It’s a bold choice, tying into Nguyen’s lyrical focus on disorientation. Her sonic cohesion allows her to wander lyrically, drifting towards Saigon and Berkeley. Islands and water and predators accompany her movements, the tropes of exotic adventure recast as set dressing for Nguyen’s inward exploration. The lines between singer and landscape are always being redrawn here— on the album’s closing track “Marrow,” she looks inward but at the same time becomes drought herself, her partner the coast, an enveloping thing that she can’t help searching for.
Owen Pallett’s Island builds an even more all-consuming world around its singer-protagonist. The album is a sequel to Pallett’s Heartland, a 2010 concept album about falling in love with and killing the god that is narrating your life, and picks up some time after our protagonist Lewis destroys his god-narrator Owen, severing their connection. Where Heartland focused on Lewis’ rage against Owen, Island concerns itself instead with reunion and repentance. It’s a thematic shift that’s matched in the album’s sonics. Heartland’s arrangements buzzed with chaotic energy, virtuosic sounds dancing in your ears. Island is grimmer and more ambient, its sound more shaped by Pallett’s work scoring films like 2013’s Her and the 2018 live action Dumbo. Island is a truly cinematic album—each sound feels carefully chosen to drive the themes and narrative of the album, with no room for unconstructive flourish. On a song like “A Bloody Morning,” you can feel yourself falling into Lewis’ self, the insistent rhythm of the piano and drums driving you into the wave-like crash of the horns and strings.
It’s an album that works because of its precision, its ability to not just aim high but land on the exact point it marked out for itself. At the heart of it all is Pallett themself, who manages to balance weighty biblical allusion with raw human grief. It’s an album that sees no difference between emotional honesty and aesthetic complexity, that takes the constructed dichotomy between the crust punks of the world and the Jacob Colliers and turns it into meaningless punditry.
I am normally not given towards concept albums—I write mostly about singles, and think the focus on the album as a unitary whole is counter-productive to good music criticism. And yet this year I have been drawn to massive, enveloping albums, whether they’re 3 hour Grateful Dead live sets or the worlds that Nguyen and Pallett build. My world has contracted this year, boiling off excesses until all that is left is within the walls of a South Bay apartment building. Here, fantasy worlds feel like a necessity.
Eli Winter on Allegra Krieger, David Grubbs and Taku Unami, Wesley Wolffe, Tenci, TJO, and Still House Plants
(Twitter | Instagram | eliwinter.com)
Lots of records won't mean anything in five years. These will. (Disclosure: I am lucky to know several of these musicians. Coincidence.)
Allegra Krieger — The Joys of Forgetting (Northern Spy). Saw very, very few people write about this record, a quiet gem that feels like everything you’ve wanted a songwriter to do crystallized. Reminds me a bit of Judee Sill, but feels ubiquitous. Lots of production easter eggs if that’s your thing, lots of concise, complex lyrics: “How beautiful, the push and the pull of a warm embrace; and how delicate the eyes desolate in a lover's face.” And lots of AK’s warm, arresting voice. This record makes excellence sound so easy. Gorgeous.
David Grubbs and Taku Unami — Comet Meta (Blue Sea). Crystalline, constellate duets, like the dust of comets trailing into space. David Grubbs is a music lifer: started touring as a teen on through the present day. He's a living legend, and now Taku Unami is, too. The title track, for two knotty guitar melodies with god-level clarity and crispness, was all I could listen to for weeks, a period when listening to any music felt insurmountable—except this: listen for 7:15, when it starts to surpass music. Elsewhere appear hums, muffled sirens, throbs, and at least two piercing barks (!).
Wesley Wolffe — Wesley Wolffe (Total Works). New combinations of textures, progressions, melodies, and tonalities or lack thereof, with a band that threads the needle between tight and ragged. It’s just fucked up how good this is.
Tenci — My Heart Is An Open Field (Keeled Scales). I could talk about this record for years. It’s so, so strange, and so comfortable in and understanding of its peculiarities, and uses these to such effect. The band is spare, rich and slow, like a cowboy nursing a broken heart in slow motion, and “Joy" and "Joy 2” make me cry literally every time, as does “Earthquake” (ed’s note: he’s crying). I’m proud to live in Chicago, where Tenci is based, and not just so I can see them live and tell them how much this record has helped me through the year. No matter what kind of music you want—do you want music this rich, eccentric, moving, inquisitive and focused? Come to Chicago.
TJO — Songs for Peacock (Orindal). Words are hard to find for this record, one especially personal, which stays with you long after the fact of its first listen. Tara Jane O’Neil—also a living legend—made it in the wake of the loss of her late brother. All the songs are covers. It doesn’t exactly remind me of anything, but only because TJO is singular. Lush, spectral, gently challenging, music for the remembrance of things and people past.
Still House Plants — Fast Edit (Bison / Blank Forms). Sounds like nothing else.
Albums of the Year - #5.5
Saint Cloud- Waxahatchee
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple Music
I first heard Waxahatchee—stage name of Katie Crutchfield, the singer-songwriter behind another great band, P.S. Eliot—when they opened for Courtney Barnett. Mo and I were at the Greek Theatre, which was already special, because I had never been before. The Greek, if you haven’t been, feels like a smaller Hollywood Bowl; if you haven’t been to the Hollywood Bowl, then picture the most intimate, spiritual place you’ve been—that’s the Bowl, with perfect acoustics, the mountains surrounding, a glowing cross on a hill in the distance.
So the Greek was this tiny, seemingly ethereal outdoor venue, and I was excited for Barnett to play loud, excellent music. But first Crutchfield came out with only her guitar. And I’ll never forget how she started to sing Lucinda Williams, because it felt like suddenly the whole world was blooming, and Crutchfield was the epicentre of such lushness:
Tangerines and persimmons
And sugarcane
Grapes and honeydew melon,
Enough fit for a queen
After this night, I dove into Waxahatchee’s music, starting with Cerulean Salt because I liked the blue album artwork. Out in the Storm is one of my favorites to play loudly in the car. Her Jason Molina covers with Kevin Morby are reverent and mesmerizing. But what my most played music from Crutchfield comes down to is her 2018 EP, Great Thunder. For a while, I had to be listening to this in order to write. Most of my undergraduate thesis was written with “Slow You Down” and “Chapel of Pines” as the repeating soundtrack. Great Thunder is stripped down, raw, and so comforting—and Crutchfield’s voice breaks and yearns as if she were standing right beside you, back in the Greek or in the middle of some dew-dappled forest.
This year’s Saint Cloud takes everything good about Great Thunder and turns it ever sweeter, even brighter. I made mention already that my favorite opener of the year is “Oxbow,” which closes with the mantra, “I want it all / I want it all / I want it all.”
This song is both big and small, booming and reversed, catchy and a bit strange—ultimately, though, what “Oxbow” serves as is a declaration. Saint Cloud is Crutchfield’s project following her decision to get sober; “Oxbow” is her announcing she is choosing, wanting, and striving to be better for herself.
Crutchfield’s undertaking of self-improvement and self-care is at times both comforting and absolutely terrifying. Does that register? Have you felt that way, standing at the precipice, knowing there are infinitely many paths to take, but it seems to boil down to Are you now ready to take charge of your life, to claim you as your own, and go forth? It’s like, there are so many possibilities, and the world is wide open, but you’re still this small, scared kid who doesn’t know yet if you’re ready for “it all.”
But you are. You are, if you bravely decide, to make amends and peace with the past. It’s hard work, yes, but it’s your work to do.
My favorite song of the year (again… how I almost left this album off, I do not know) is “Lilacs.” Early in quarantine, I would drive around my neighborhood, up and down and around the cul-de-sacs, blasting “Lilacs” at max volume.
Out of context, speaking just lyrically, it’s a bop:
If I’m a broke record, write it in the dust, babe,
I’ll fill myself back up like I used to do
And if my bones are made of delicate sugar,
I won’t end up anywhere good without you
I won’t end up anywhere good without you, ooh
I need your love too
And the lilacs drank the water
And the lilacs drank the water
And the liiIiiillaaacccs drank the waaaTtttter
But placed in the context of both Crutchfield’s personal sobriety as well as our collective grieving this year, “Lilacs” becomes a signal for resilience and a sign to keep going. There is more work to be done. We aren’t out of the weeds yet, but there, at the horizon, is an oasis. It’s Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” but Americana-folk at its finest sound.
What “Lilacs” gives me, really, is a lifeline to hold onto and to look toward.
Saint Cloud in its entirety is bittersweet, strong-willed, and stubborn. From “Fire” to “Hell,” “War” to “Witches,” there is something here for anyone who has ever waged a war with themselves, lost, and got back up again. It’s more than a cherry on top that Crutchfield’s voice is such a strong instrument, elevating each song from music to a way of practice in action. We can all stand to learn a little something from Saint Cloud, most of all that there’s reprieve for each of us, and it likely lies no further from us than at the nearby creek, or at the end of the cul-de-sac down the street.
Be warm, happy Sunday, and speak soon,
Tay