Music Reviews
12 Albums from 2021 You Might Have Missed
More “some of my favorites” than “The Best of 2021”
The thing is, nobody can listen to everything. Even the most dedicated crate-diggers discover great albums that somehow passed them by, and that’s to say nothing of the folks who suddenly realize that the last new album they listened to came out back when you still had to buy CDs to listen to new music. And as a matter of fact, I know a lot of people my age — old — who use the advent of streaming as an excuse to throw up their hands: “Anybody with a laptop can put an album on the internet now! I can’t listen to all of that!”
Well, for a kinda ridiculous amount of time — roughly 1987 to 2014 — I was a record reviewer, which meant it was literally my job to listen to as much new music as possible. And you couldn’t listen to everything back then, either. And with streaming services like Apple Music and download sites like Bandcamp (where you can also buy LPs, CDs, and even cassettes — although cassettes suck as much in the 2020s as they did in the 1980s — directly from artists and labels), it’s never been easier to dive in. So here’s 12 albums and singles released in 2021 that might have passed you by before now. If any of these reviews sound interesting, there’s links to Apple Music (free subscription required) and Bandcamp for further listening.
Observatory — Aeon Station (Sub Pop)
Fans of ’90s indie rockers The Wrens have been waiting for the band’s fourth album for 19 years now, despite occasional promises that the follow-up to 2003’s The Meadowlands had been finished as far back as 2013. Well, apparently one reason for the delay was increasing tension between the band’s chief songwriters, guitarist Charles Bissell and bassist/keyboardist Kevin Whelan, over allegations of perfectionism, obstructionism, and plain old orneriness on both sides. Now Kevin Whelan has released his planned contributions to that mythical fourth album as Observatory by Aeon Station. The cover photo of a half-finished skyscraper is almost certainly a middle finger to Bissell, who claims he’s going to release his own songs this year. The other two Wrens, Kevin’s guitarist brother Greg and drummer Jerry McDonald, both appear here, but Bissell’s contributions have either been erased or re-recorded.
I didn’t listen to The Wrens during their heyday, even though their blend of shoegazey fuzz and scrappy indie-rock urgency — somewhere between Slowdive and Superchunk, more or less — was right up my alley. (Again, nobody can listen to everything.) So coming at Observatory without nearly two decades of expectations, I hear an album full of slow-burner songs that build into transcendent climaxes, mixed with a few (particularly “Fade” and the uplifting standout “Better Love”) that start at full whack and just stay there. Whelan’s not a confessional lyricist, generally preferring oblique metaphors. Which makes last track “Alpine Drive,” with its pointed couplet “Still breaking rocks into songs we never get done / Where are the memories to the plans we made?” feel even more nakedly personal.
Jazz Is Dead Volume 6 — Gary Bartz with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (Jazz Is Dead)
Back in 2020, producer/arranger Adrian Younge and A Tribe Called Quest co-founder Ali Shaheed Muhammad started a project they puckishly called Jazz Is Dead. They’ve used this concept to collaborate with an older generation of musicians, including an amazing 2020 record with one of my Brazilian heroes, Marcos Valle. Saxophonist Gary Bartz has a resume stretching back to his time in Charles Mingus’ Jazz Workshop in the early ’60s, and his discography includes Miles’ fusion wild-out Live-Evil and Pharoah Sanders’ hypnotic Deaf Dumb Blind. But Younge and Muhammad are more interested in Bartz’s ’70s work as a leader, both in the politically-minded soul-jazz group NTU Troop and especially a gorgeously slick pair of jazz-funk albums he recorded with the Mizell Brothers in the mid-’70s, The Shadow Do and Music Is My Sanctuary. (The first was the source of the hook in Quest’s 1991 classic “Butter.”) These eight tracks are a modern updating of that mellow, groove-based sound, recorded on vintage equipment to fully capture touches like the almost inaudible wordless voices that punctuate the opening “Spiritual ideation” or the liquid waves of electric piano and chimes underpinning Bartz’s elegant soloing on “Day By Day.” British producer Floating Points got all the press for his collaboration with Sanders last year (and deserved, that’s a great album), but Younge and Muhammad have had that intergenerational conversation over and over, and it’s great each time.
Painting Box — Beautify Junkyards (Ghost Box)
One thing I love about the rise of streaming is that it’s reaffirmed something I’ve always believed: the building block of pop music is the single, not the album. I’ve always loved singles — I owned a small failed indie label for a brief period in the late ’90s that focused almost entirely on them — and there are ways in which a band’s singles can tell you more about them than their albums do. The little beauty, a collaboration between the Portuguese electronic act Beautify Junkyards and Jim Jupp (the co-owner of their label, Ghost Box Records, who also records under the name The Belbury Poly), is a cover of a 1967 single by Scottish psych-folk elves The Incredible String Band. The original, a sprightly love song written by ISB co-founder Mike Heron, was one of that duo’s more conventional tunes. Here, Beautify Junkyards and The Belbury Poly turn it into a gorgeous electronic twinkle of a song, luminous and mysterious. The original on the flip, “Ritual In Transfigured Time,” is an equally haunting song equally reminiscent of two other cult psych-era acts, first-generation electronic rockers The United States of America and Brazil’s proto-goth freaks Os Mutantes.
One key part of Ghost Box Records is Jupp’s commitment to making all of his releases beautiful objects that are a delight to hold. Graphic designer Julian House gives all the Ghost Box releases a unified look that’s as evocative and otherworldly as the music. And that extends beyond the records: when I bought this single (along with Beautify Junkyards’ 2021 album Cosmorama and a couple of older GB releases), they arrived on my stoop not in the usual brown corrugated mailer, but a gorgeous thick cardboard box with a purple and gold fleur-de-lys-like pattern imprinted on it inside and out. I hated to put it in the recycling bin.
Apple Music / Ghost Box Records
Cavalcade — Black Midi (Rough Trade)
Possibly my favorite indie rock mini-trend of the last few years has been a handful of young British bands — mostly Brighton’s Squid, Cambridge’s Black Country, New Road, and London’s Black Midi — who have been doing this bracingly strange mix of post-punk, free jazz, and the more aggressive side of ’70s progressive rock. (Think King Crimson, Captain Beefheart, or This Heat.) Black Midi’s 2019 debut Schlagenheim was so overwhelmingly all-over-the-place that as soon as it was over the first time we listened to it, my wife Charity asked me to put it back on from the beginning just so she could try to make sense of it. (Charity also pointed out immediately who it was lead singer Georgie Greep’s strangulated yelp of a talk-singing voice reminded us of: he is quite often a vocal dead ringer for Pere Ubu’s David Thomas.) Being in the band was apparently even more discombobulating: though he’s still nominally a member of the band and has songwriting credits on two tracks, guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin sat these recording sessions out for what was described as mental health reasons. He’s replaced by keyboardist Seth Evans and saxophonist Kaidi Akinnibi, whose contributions push Cavalcade into a more avant-jazz direction that’s reminiscent at times of the current London avant-jazz scene. Opener “John L” (which apparent Roman-numeral-fan Greep pronounces “John Fifty” throughout) dials up the supercaffienated tension of the debut to an almost unbearable degree, but thankfully after that, things start to breathe a bit more. “Marlene Dietrich” is almost pretty, and “Diamond Stuff” is a hushed, dramatic piece that never quite builds to the expected explosive climax. The sumptuous 10-minute closer “Ascending Forth” definitely does, though.
Striking a blow for physical product in a streaming world, CD and LP copies of Cavalcade all start with a 91-second untitled instrumental that isn’t on the sites. It’s literally just some keyboard drones, though.
Fake / Fear — Chastity Belt (self-released)
Seattle quartet Chastity Belt didn’t put out a new album in 2021 (co-leader Julia Shapiro released her amazing second solo album, Zorked, instead, which I’ll write about in a future installment), but they did manage this great self-released stand-alone single that sums up both sides of their musical personality. Shapiro’s “Fake” is a dreamy, sweetly melodic, mostly-acoustic lope of a song with a half-whispered vocal and a chorus that’s just the line “I’m a fake” repeated over and over. It’s kind of like if the Haim sisters had grown up listening to Mazzy Star instead of Fleetwood Mac. “Fear,” written and sung by the band’s other singer/guitarist Lydia Lund, is all layers of electric fuzz and distortion cradling a wavering, echoey lead guitar, as a multi-tracked Lund sings and screams “It’s just the fear!” in a way that’s possibly meant to sound reassuring but becomes increasingly scary itself. I would have loved Chastity Belt when I was a college radio DJ in the early ’90s. I still do.
Scatterbrain — The Chills (Fire)
Speaking of college radio, that’s where I discovered The Chills in the latter half of the ’80s, and by the time of 1990’s perfect single “Heavenly Pop Hit” — quite often my favorite song of all time — and its endlessly fascinating parent album Submarine Bells, I thought they were going to be the one band out of the fertile New Zealand indie scene that were going to have an R.E.M.-style mainstream breakthrough. Singer-songwriter Martin Phillipps had other plans, which mostly revolved around his fondness for heroin. One weirdly misguided followup and a just-fucking-terrible last gasp later, The Chills were no more from 1997 to 2013. Off the smack and more recently armed with a new liver to combat the life-threatening case of Hepatitis C it led to, Phillips has led an entirely new lineup of The Chills through two albums, 2015’s Silver Bullets and 2018’s Snow Bound (every album since Submarine Bells has superstitiously held on to those initials) that were way better than his ’90s work, but still weren’t quite what made me fall in love with his music back in high school.
And while I absolutely hate it when reviewers call an album someone’s best work since their obvious career high point, Scatterbrain really is the best album The Chills have made in over 30 years. In fact, it feels like the album Phillipps wanted 1992’s Soft Bomb to be if his new American label hadn’t forced some a couple of terrible decisions on him, saddling him with a producer who had no idea what The Chills were supposed to sound like and drafting in The dB’s’ Peter Holsapple as an uncredited song doctor. Like Soft Bomb, Scatterbrain is awash in mysterious, swirling string sections and off-kilter song structures. But this time they work, matching the always inexplicable strangeness of Phillipps’ lyrics. So we get songs like the semi-orchestral first single “You’re Immortal” alongside the more conventionally Chills-like rush of “Worlds Within Worlds.” It’s great to have him back for real.
“Tally Ho!” and Boodle Boodle Boodle — The Clean (Flying Nun 1981/Merge 2021)
For their 40th anniversary, Merge Records reissued the first 7" and EP by another of the pioneering bands of the New Zealand indie scene, The Clean. David Kilgour, Hamish Kilgour and Robert Scott (and very very briefly toward the beginning, Peter Gutteridge, who was later in The Chills) sound in retrospect like they arrived fully formed on these two brief sets. Only the ultra-lo-fi no-budget production separates them from their slightly more accomplished later records. Between them these seven songs contain three all-time NZ masterpieces, the giddily ramshackle organ-driven “Tally Ho!,” the shimmering “Anything Can Happen,” and the hypnotic forward rush of “Point That Thing Somewhere Else,” which sounds like German synth pioneers Neu! tackling the last 45 seconds of the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On.” These songs have been available for decades on CD and vinyl comps, but it’s delightful to hear — and see — them in their original homemade glory.
Apple Music (Boodle) / Apple Music (“Tally Ho!”)
Bandcamp (Boodle) / Bandcamp (“Tally Ho!)
Eight Point Star — Eight Point Star (VHF)
Eight Point Star is a (mostly) instrumental quartet from down around Blacksburg, Virginia, fronted by fiddle player Mike Gangloff. I mostly know him for his work with an old-time Appalachian group called the Black Twig Pickers, who recorded a couple of great albums with guitarist Steve Gunn along with their own stuff. But before that, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, he led a noise-drone band called Pelt that my more avant-leaning friends were super heavily into. Eight Point Star are neither as loud and chaotic as Pelt nor as traditionally-minded as the Pickers, favoring a groovily hypnotic acoustic sound that nods to the usual alt-folk suspects — Sandy Bull, Robbie Basho, and of course John Fahey — but also has some of the homespun “what happens if we do this?” improvisational vibe that’s underpinned everything from the most pastoral side of ’70s European progressive rock to the outer edges of the Elephant 6 collective 20-something years ago. Guitarist Matt Peyton’s two electric-bluesy vocal contributions are…okay…but it’s tracks like the spiraling “Mount Calvary Peacock” and the straight-up unstructured and psychedelic “A Water Panther Speaks” that resonate.
God’s Pee At State’s End! — Godspeed You! Black Emperor (Constellation)
As much as I love them, I have to admit that fundamentally every album by this Montreal post-rock collective has the same vibe. There’s a bed of indistinct but foreboding noises, and out of that swells an elongated, aggressive instrumental suite, during which the lead instrument is as likely to be a viola or cello as it is an electric guitar. And all of the tracks, which usually fade into each other imperceptibly, have titles that are either completely inscrutable or vaguely apocalyptic in a Crass-like anarcho-peacenik way. None of this is meant to mock or belittle Godspeed’s seventh album, which is as brilliantly unsettling/triumphant as their earlier work: it’s simply true at this point in their quarter-century-plus career that if you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you’ll like.
T.O.N.T.O. — Robin Hatch (Robin)
Robin Hatch is a multi-instrumentalist and composer from Toronto. T.O.N.T.O. is a 20-foot semicircle of hulking wooden cabinets filled with electronic components, first built in 1968 by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. After Cecil and Margouleff recorded two albums of their own under the name Tonto’s Expanding Headband — and they are amazing — they joined forces with Stevie Wonder to create four unassailable classics of early ’70s electro-funk, along with appearances on albums by everyone from the Doobie Brothers to Joan Baez. Now housed in Calgary’s National Music Centre, T.O.N.T.O. is rarely played anymore, but Hatch landed a four-day residency to record with the machine in early 2021. Although the nine resulting songs are subtly layered with additional tracks, both by fellow Toronto musicians and Hatch playing other vintage electronic instruments (including a phaser that had belonged to Toronto’s late prog-noise mainstay Nash the Slash), the vintage analogue sound of T.O.N.T.O. remains front and center throughout. Essential for vintage-synth fans like myself, though I get why others may find it less completely fascinating.
An Overview On Phenomenal Nature — Cassandra Jenkins (Ba Da Bing!)
In the summer of 2019, New York singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins accepted an offer to play guitar in the touring lineup of ex-Silver Jews frontman David Berman’s new band Purple Mountains. After a month of rehearsals, days before the tour was to begin, David Berman died by suicide on August 7, 2019.
Shaken by the sudden death of her new friend — whom she’d never met before he asked her to join his band — and with a sudden gap in her schedule following the tour’s cancellation, Jenkins traveled, then wandered around her home city recording snatches of conversation and found sound on her phone, and finally in one sustained burst of creativity wrote the songs that became her second solo album. A sort of audio diary of this period of her life, An Overview On Phenomenal Nature is not nearly as heavy or painful to listen to as I’d initially worried it might be. (I should note here that I’m a fan of David Berman’s work who still finds Purple Mountains an absolutely unbearable listen.) Even the song that addresses Berman most directly, “Ambiguous Norway,” feels more wistful (“You’re gone/You’re everywhere”) than actively sad. Elsewhere, Jenkins’ lyrics lean on friends and family (“New Bikini,” ruefully built on that HomeGoods-slat-sign wisdom that a beach trip cures everything) and oddball encounters with strangers. The centerpiece “Hard Drive” mixes spoken-word verses and delicately-sung choruses in a way I find oddly reminiscent of Laurie Anderson, particularly in the low-key humor of Jenkins’ character sketches. (“And with her pink lipstick and Queens accent, she went on for a while about our president.”) Here and elsewhere, Jenkins plays with pandemic-era self-help tropes and alternative therapies, with a sense best described as open-minded skepticism. Musically, Jenkins, producer Josh Kaufman, and a small group of cohorts (special shout-out to saxophonist Stuart Bogie and string arranger Oliver Hill) create a sophisticated blend of guitars and subtle electronics reminiscent at times of everything from late ’80s Go-Betweens to Kaputt-era Destroyer. It all ends with the 8-minute instrumental “The Ramble,” an almost ambient mix of guitars, synthesizers, and Central Park field recordings of birdsong, a peaceful and inspiring end to a deeply emotional album.
Amusing side note: this was something of a sleeper hit, selling out of multiple LP pressings until I finally managed to snag one that due to vinyl pressing scarcity meant that I didn’t actually get my hands on a physical copy of this March 2021 release until January 2022. And even then, that was after an email from the owner of Ba Da Bing! Records saying basically “Sooooo…we just got this run of Cassandra’s album, and this has never happened before but they were supposed to press it on milk-white vinyl and this is actually a kind of transparent teal. If you had your heart set on the white version, they’re repressing it, but know that the plant is saying it won’t be done until May.” The vinyl slowdown is real, y’all.
Death of a Cheerleader — Pom Pom Squad (City Slang)
When Mia Barrin sings “You should ask your mother what she means / When she says stay away from girls like me” on “Head Cheerleader,” the Cheap Trick allusion is certainly intentional. As is the Smokey Robinson cop in the chorus of “Second That.” And when Mia and her three bandmates tackle the psych-pop chestnut “Crimson and Clover,” it’s clearly Joan Jett’s cover that they’re nodding to instead of Tommy James’ original. (Unlike both, they’re also clever enough to only play the song’s good bits, which means it’s over in a little over two minutes flat.) This Brooklyn quartet’s mix of punky guitar, ’60s pop hooks (the dreamy “This Couldn’t Happen” is a 90-second updating of The Fleetwoods that’s waiting for David Lynch to discover it) and the biracial, queer 20-something Barrin’s sharp-as-hell lyrics makes Death of a Cheerleader 2021’s best power pop album. Too bad the “biracial, queer, 20-something woman” part means most of the power pop crowd will turn their noses up at it, but that’s their loss.
