Let’s wrap up the year with our 20 favorite tracks of 2019! You can stream the top 10 below, or check out the Spotify playlist with all 20. You will recognize artists like B Boys, Matmos, Drug Apts., and Boy Harsher, to name a few, from our favorite albums of the year. This list brings you standout tracks from those LP efforts like “Pressure Inside,” “Silicone Gel Implant,” “New Nam,” and “LA,” respectively. In addition, you will find Kelly Moran back on the list with her gorgeous cut “Love Birds, Night Birds, Devil-Birds,” Fidelity Kastrow‘s pummeling techno on “Daughter of Darkness,” and much more…
10. Oiseaux–Tempête “He Is Afraid and So Am I”
The French musical collective Oiseaux-Tempête released their fourth studio LP From Somewhere Invisible this past October via Sub Rosa. “He Is Afraid and So Am I” is the album’s powerful opener. Amidst a swirling drone and tumble of percussion, vocalist G.W. Sok (The Ex) emerges to narrate a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Two strangers sit side by side at a cafe. Each wears a striped shirt and reads the evening paper. Like mirrors, the parallels between the two crisscross, but in the end what reflects back is only the existential divide that separates them.
9. Kelly Moran “Love Birds, Night Birds, Devil-Birds”
Kelly Moran‘s 2018 LP Ultraviolet (Warp Records) was our favorite album of last year. This year’s “Origins” EP is a companion piece and it draws from some of the unedited sessions that would go on to make up last year’s fantastic effort. Combining recordings of her prepared piano with some additional electronics, Moran creates compositions of sumptuous beauty like this track “Love Birds, Night Birds, Devil-Birds.” Discussing her recording set-up with Magnetic Magazine, the musician explained:
“The most important part of my gear… my piano! I have a Boston piano that is a GP 178 Performance Edition II. It’s 5’10’’ and is just big enough to be considered a full grand piano. My family got this piano for me when I was in high school and seriously studying to attend conservatories for piano performance. I’ve been preparing it with screws and bolts for the past three years and have made all of my recent records on it-including Bloodroot, Optimist, Ultraviolet, and Origin EP. Oddly enough, my piano tuner says my piano sounds better and better every time he comes to tune it, so feeding it a steady diet of screws and bolts must be working.”
8. Tropical Fuck Storm “Paradise”
Tropical Fuck Storm delivered the contraband this year on their sophomore LP effort Braindrops (Joyful Noise Recordings). “Paradise” was anything but, as the group poured The Velvet Underground, Royal Trux, and Pussy Galore into a cocktail shaker, laced it with singer Gareth Liddiard‘s heavy dose of spleen, to make this toxic brew of love-sick blues.
7. Fidelity Kastrow “Daughter of Darkness”
Berlin-raised DJ, producer, and radio host Fidelity Kastrow dropped her “Daughter of Darkness” EP this past April via Novamute. As a regular DJ at Sisyphos, in their warehouse-sized main room Hammahalle, Kastrow assures us the three tracks have been battle-tested in the club’s cavernous surroundings. That’s immediately evident on the EP’s title cut where immaculately produced percussion meets blistering industrial tones and ghostly noise to create minimalist, spell-binding techno.
6. Drug Apts. “New Nam”
Drug Apts. Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances (Mt. St. Mtn.) was a ferocious slab of empowered punk. The Sacramento-based group recorded their long-player with Tim Green (The Nation Of Ulysses, The Fucking Champs), and he also joined the ranks of the band this year. While the record contains several standouts like “Straight Shooter” and “Black Coat,” “New Nam” had us ready to fight the good fight.
While the band twists various strands of Rock and Punk into new and interesting shapes unconstrained by style or genre, singer Whitney K exhorts us with directives like, “the tools are at your fingertips” and “have your own vision.” Trouble making decisions in your life? “New Nam” is an energetic directive to tackle your issues head on and get your shit done!
5. Matmos “Silicone Gel Implant”
This year Matmos celebrated 25 years together with their Plastic Anniversary LP (Thrill Jockey). The ubiquitous molded polymer is the sonic guide here, with M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel sourced all the sounds on the album from recordings made of plastic. While the challenge of making these sounds interesting was at the heart of the record, the problematic ecological questions that plastic presents shadowed the project throughout.
Speaking with Vice this year, M. C. Schmidt wondered:
“Like breast implants—do I feel like they’re bad? Is it any of my business to feel like they’re bad, or good, or what? I don’t know. I would just as soon let the object be the guide…”
4. Boy Harsher “LA”
Boy Harsher released their excellent sophomore LP Careful this year on their label imprint, Nude Club Records. “LA” is a noir, electro masterpiece that comes complete with a rippling bass and propulsive drum line. Industrially tuned synth adds just the right moody atmosphere, while singer Jae Matthews paints cinematic details with each cryptically delivered line.
3. B Boys “Pressure Inside”
B Boys know everybody’s feeling that pressure inside, but don’t worry, Andrew Kerr, Brendon Avalos, and Britton Walker got your back. In fact, if it came down to the proverbial fight in a dark alley, you couldn’t ask for a better crew to back you. Mounting debt and emotional ambivalence got you locked in that 350 sq. ft. prison cell you call a studio apartment? Don’t worry, the B Boys boys have been there too, and their engaged and activated brand of rock-n-roll is just what you need to get you off your ass and running again…
2. Black Marble “Feels”
Black Marble released Bigger Than Life this past October on Sacred Bones. “Feels” is like that favorite old sweater where comfort is delicately interwoven with personal history. Lyrically, “Feels” touches on notions of nostalgia as the song’s fictional character reflects on his “nineties” past with memories of having a “radio show” and “working a blood drive in DC.”
For Black Marble’s Chris Stewart, this fictional remembrance triggers a very real reflection on his own musical past, as he explains: “…that part of the country was central to underground music in America and having radio shows on college radio was a popular thing for students to do.” Longing for those more communal times, Stewart wonders whether internet culture has led to a “digital pastiche of correlated yet not at all united artists.” This has him pining for that time when “local scenes seemed more cohesive and unified and maybe a little more innocent.“
1. Caterina Barbieri “Fantas”
Caterina Barbieri released her Ecstatic Computation LP on May 3rd via Editions Mego. The Italian composer uses complex sequencing techniques to create multifaceted sonic patterns on the album’s six tracks. Minimalist in style, Barbieri’s compositions encourage an awareness of the now, even as her varied textures seem to slip and slide back-and-forth in time.
“Fantas” opens the composer’s new LP collection. Suggesting vast dimensions, a cosmic wind seems to reverberate thru the space as a slowly coalescing melody gains sentience and force. Eventually splintering off into glittering arpeggios, the track’s growing complexity gains an opulescent gleam before its entropic demise causes an ear splitting collapse.
Favorite Tracks 2019 Spotify Playlist:
11. La Fraicheur “Weltschmerz” 12. Xiu Xiu “Pumpkin Attack on Mommy and Daddy” 13. Steve Hauschildt “Nonlin” 14. The QuietTemple “The Last Opium Den (On Earth)” 15. Chromatics “You’re No Good” 16. HTRK “Venus In Leo” 17. Blue Glass “We Loved the Rain” 18. Beechwood “I Know It’s Not Right” 19. Salami Rose Joe Louis “Sitting With Thoughts” 20. Ooozing Wound “Tween Shitbag”
