Favorite Albums of 2017

(Plus: Friend Rock Four and Other Notable Releases)

Reading all the terrible news this year, at times it was hard for me to get too worked up about music. This was weird for me, because getting too worked up about music has always been one of my favorite things to do. Still, there was a good side to this: Being less opinionated about music means letting go of biases against people who like music I don't like, and we need all the friends we can find these days. (Translation: It was fun to realize that the juggalos aren't so bad after all.) But I regret to say I also was less enthusiastic about music I actually like.

Fortunately, some longtime indie favorites of mine released good (though hardly groundbreaking) albums this year, including Spoon, the New Pornographers and LCD Soundsystem. The reunited older bands Dream Syndicate, Luna and the Jesus and Mary Chain kept the flame of guitar-based rock burning at a time when I really needed its light and heat. What's more, I am lucky to be friends with some really talented artists who put out great albums this year. I've set them aside at a section at the end of this list.

And so, in no particular order, here are my 10 favorite albums of the year, with some video links (Bandcamp links for songs where I couldn't find a video) and some extra fun stuff at the end. As usual, I say "my favorite" not "the best." I haven't heard everything released this year. I haven't heard the new Charlotte Gainsbourg, and I don't have the patience to listen to the new Bjork. Let me know what your favorites were this year.


1. White Reaper - The World's Best American Band. Don't let anyone tell you there isn't real rock 'n' roll being made by young people today. I went to see White Reaper play at the 7th Street Entry on a rainy Monday night shortly after the album's release, and I when I stepped in from the unpleasant sidewalk, the place was packed with people singing along. Everyone was smiling. Someone was crowd-surfing -- if you know the Entry, you know that you might hit your head on the ceiling if you do that. I took out my phone to take a video of the band, but then I just turned my camera toward the audience because the crowd was so much fun to watch. That's how you know it's a good rock show. When I saw them a second time later this year, also at the Entry, the place was packed and there was so much crowd-surfing that at one point, the roadie took over the drums so the crowd could carry the drummer up to the bar to get a drink. Standout track: "Judy French."

2. Luna, A Place of Greater Safety/A Sentimental Education. The reunited Luna released two records this year. A Place of Greater Safety is an instrumental record that shows off the great guitar playing of Dean Wareham and Sean Eden, and how nicely they pair with the rhythm section. A Sentimental Education is a very good collection of covers. Lots of people record covers of songs by artists that influenced them, but perhaps only Luna would decide to record a Velvet Underground cover and pick a Doug Yule-written song from the much derided post-Lou Reed VU album "Squeeze." Standout track: A cover of the Cure's "Fire in Cairo" takes that somewhat silly song (from the band's debut record, recorded when they were teenagers and had yet to settle on the familiar Cure look or sound) and makes it into something between pleasant and eerie. The video features Rose MacGowan, who has been much in the news this year.

3. Alvvays - Antisocialites. I liked this Canadian band's first album, but this one is much bolder. The whole band sounds good but the emphasis is on singer-songwriter Molly Rankin, whose voice is way out in front of the mix, rather than being just part of the somewhat shoegaze-inspired sound. Like a lot of indie rock today, it's too much on the polite and commercial side for my tastes (when I look at videos of the band, I can't shake the feeling that Molly Rankin is just Gwyneth Paltrow's character from the Royal Tennenbaums come to life) but the the lyrics are sharp, the melodies are great and there's some cool noise bubbling under the surface. I like it. Standout track: In Undertow.

4. Ted Leo - The Hanged Man. When I saw him and band in concert this fall, Ted Leo spent a lot of time talking between songs, and the audience ate it up. He was so charming and funny that at times the music was not quite as much fun as just listening to him talk. This is Leo's first album since the 2013 record he released with Aimee Mann as the Both, and the first under his own name since 2010's "The Brutalist Bricks." In fact, this is the first one he's released under his own name without "and the Pharmacists" appended to it. It's his most musically ambitious and personally revealing album, and the first on his own record label. It's a double album and it takes time for it to sink in, but it's Ted Leo: It's always a pleasure to hang out with this dude. Standout track: "Lonsdale Avenue."

5. Robyn Hitchcock - Self-titled - While their styles are very different, Robyn Hitchcock shares some similarity with Ted Leo in terms of their audiences and their positions as artists. Hitchcock is solidly entrenched with his cult following and has a great reputation for his live shows, which he typically performs solo, and where his surrealistic between-song banter is just as much a part of the appeal as his music. I did not expect him to come out with a sequel to his classic debut solo album "Black Snake Diamond Role" 35 years later, but that may be the best way to describe this record. In fact, it may be even better than that. I'm pretty sure I listened to this album more often than anything else on this list this year. Standout track "Mad Shelley's Letterbox" may be my favorite Hitchcock song ever.

6. Bash & Pop - Anything Could Happen. Speaking of rock veterans, here's the new one from Tommy Stinson, who started the Replacements when he was 11 years old. Using the name of his band from back when the Replacements first broke up, Stinson released what has to be the best album of Replacements-like rock 'n' roll in decades. (Here I should mention that the Replacements' recently released Live at Maxwell's album, documenting a 1986 show, is really fun too.)  Equally informed by punk, country and roots rock, it's just full of great songs. It sounds like a party every time you put it on. Every song on here is good, but let's say the standout track is the Faces-reminiscent: "Bad News."

7. Japanese Breakfast - Soft Sounds From Another Planet
With its "Be My Baby" drums and lush orchestration, standout track: "Boyish" sounds more like something that should be playing at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks than anything we heard in "Twin Peaks the Return."

Nice live solo version here:

8. Ibibio Sound Machine - Self-titled. Like an Afropop version of a minimalistic early 80s electropop record. Just fantastic. Standout track: "The Pot is on Fire."

This live version is a lot of fun, too:

9. Girlpool - Powerplant. "The nihilist tells you that nothing is true / I said I faked global warming just to get close to you." That's the funny line in standout track "It Gets More Blue" that got my attention, but this is not a jokey song, and this is not a jokey group. Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker sing in close harmony, the kind of close harmony that is sort of creepy. Backed up with guitar bass and drums, with some 90s-style quiet-loud dynamics, it sounds like the Children of the Damned started a band.

10. Novella - Change of State. The UK band recorded their sophomore effort before the Brexit vote and the U.S. election, but it still sounds like an album built around our current political climate. "In America, the lamp shines green and gold," they sing in their characteristically aloof harmony vocals on the opening track. On the second track they're asking, "Will there be a change of state?" Throughout, Novella explores its customary style -- hitting the center of a Venn diagram where Nuggets psychedelia, shoegaze and krautrock meet. That makes it sound pretty spacey, but the straightforward recording (on an old 8-track machine run by James Hoare from Veronica Falls and Ultimate Painting) keeps everything grounded, in a good way. I have gone back and forth with this record. For much of the year, I put it aside, but then I listened to it again this week and once again was struck by the album's coziness -- not a quality I associate with many bands that share the same influences. Standout track: Does the Island Know?

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Friend Rock Four:

Everyone Is Dirty - My Neon's Dead - The first album by this Oakland, California, band was called "Dying is Fun," and the songs were largely inspired by an illness suffered by guitarist/producer Chris Daddio. He got over that health scare, but then his partner, vocalist/songwriter/violinist Sivan Lioncub, had a terrible illness herself when an allergic reaction caused her liver to fail. She spent something like two months in the hospital and was lucky to live. This album is largely inspired by that experience, but as she points out in the liner notes, but it's not a reckoning with mortality so much as it is the result of a drug-induced haze the doctors put her under while in her hospital bed. This is a deeply psychedelic record, where the songs flow into each other, break down with odd bits of apparently randomly recorded dialogue and then build into intense jams. It's hard to pick one song out of the flow, but maybe a good standout track is Mermaid.

Propeller - Don't Ever Let This Let You Down. Jangly guitars, crunchy guitars, choruses that go "ooh-wee-ooh," songs about summer and girls. Standout track: Oh, let's pick one. I know: Broken in So Many Places.

Will Stenberg - Eros & Error. Cosmic cowboy music that really sounds like it's drifting around in outer space. Standout track: Me and Edna St. Vincent Millay. (How many Americana albums have song titles like that?)

The Backlund - Here's to Feeling Good All the Time. Crunchy guitars and melodic vocals with lyrics about wanting to crash your car because your husband won't stop talking about wrestling and guitar gear, from a married couple who have almost certainly had days like this. Standout track: Chemical Warfare.

Also Of Note:

St. Vincent - Masseduction. Annie Clark's singing has never sounded better, and teaming up with pop superproducer Jack Antonoff has sharpened her songwriting, but I miss the focus on Clark's guitar, and I am put off by the high-gloss hypersexualization going on with the album art and promotion campaign. This was a year where the major entertainment news stories were about the harassment and abuse of women by powerful men, and the major musical criticism stories showed how much listeners are getting sick of the cults of personality around Taylor Swift and other major pop stars; With all that going on, the whole Masseduction campaign felt strangely out of touch. An ironic ass on an album cover is still an ass on an album cover. I saw St. Vincent on tour this year, playing solo in front of backing tracks and elaborate video displays, and it was good but -- go ahead, call me a rockist, -- I'd rather see her playing with a live band, singing about *anything* other than Los Angeles, New York and the artificiality of celebrity. See below:

Torres - Three Futures. If Annie Clark has stepped away from her role as Offbeat-Guitarist-Lesbian-Art-Rocker, Mackenzie Scott makes a good case that the job belongs to her with the latest Torres album, Three Futures. Coincidentally enough, like Masseduction, Three Futures prominently features a woman's ass on its cover. In this case, we see the ass belongs to a naked pole dancer who is being watched attentively by Scott herself. Yes, an ass is still an ass, but we get a story here that St. Vincent doesn't give us. The music is Scott's most ambitious yet, and it's interesting stuff. Check out the video for the title track, in which Scott plays all the roles, including that of a man who seduces a housewife.

Mavis Staples - If All I Was Was Black. Finally, if 2016 taught us anything it should be to not take our institutions for granted. I'm talking here specifically about the towering figures of music, but you know what I mean about the other institutions. So, don't sleep on Mavis Staples. As a young woman singing with her family in the Staples Singers in the 1960s, she had an unusual gravitas to her voice. Today the timbre of her voice is virtually unchanged, but experience has given her even more of a sense of authority. Jeff Tweedy's production is, as you might expect predictable dad rock (dad soul?) but you don't listen to this album for him, you listen for Mavis.

Mountain Goats - Goths. I've been following John Darnielle's career for a long time now. I've read one of his novels, I've listened to his albums, I've seen the Mountain Goats live, and I've interviewed him over the phone. (That last one did not go well, and I'm still embarrassed about it.) But listening to Goths, I felt like he interviewed me about the bands I listened to in my teenage years and then wrote an album about it. In one song he sings "It's 92 degrees and KROQ is playing Siouxsie and the Banshees" and OMG I KNOW WHAT SIOUXSIE SONG HE MEANS. On this concept album, there are a number of songs like "Andrew Eldritch is Moving Back to Leeds" that explore the topic of punks and goths growing up and trying uncomfortably to hold on to some piece of the subculture that meant so much to them when they were young, and this is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. I've always thought that goth was made for life under a right-wing conservative government, and so the album feels timely even as it wallows in nostalgia. That said, I don't really like the electric piano-led arrangements very much, so unfortunately, the album didn't make my Top 10.

The Octopus Project - Memory Mirror. Following the path the Octopus Project forged with its previous album, Fever Forms, there are more songs with vocals than ever before, but that doesn't mean this nearly indescribable Austin band is going pop. This is a strange and experimental album built on repetition, hard beats and odd sounds. Dave Fridmann mixed it, giving it his customary hard-hitting sound, and unfortunately, compressing everything to the point of distortion.