Let’s look back at our 10 favorite albums of 2020. While the year has offered unprecedented challenges to the creation of music, as well as its live enjoyment, it has been an exciting time to enjoy the art of the long-player nonetheless. In a year marked by virus and quarantine, as well as outrage and protests against police brutality and systemic racism in Western democracies, musicians reflected this anxiety and defiance in notable ways.
Provocatively addressing race and culture, DeForrest Brown‘s Speaker Music project returned this year with his Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry LP out on Planet Mu. Reclaiming the roots of rhythm and soul music, it also raised the bar on techno for black and white practitioners alike. Meanwhile, Lithic‘s post-punk offering Tower of Age (Trouble In Mind) combatted consumer culture’s wastefulness with its terse and incisive sonic statement. In contrast, LEYA‘s neoclassical approach might have bit off the same apple by using the opposite strategy on their sumptuous offering, Flood Dream (NNA Tapes).
2020 also saw the UK-based electronic producer patten making excellent use of his time by releasing three albums in the calendar year, including one of our 10 favorites, the rhythmic night adventure Aegis (555-5555). Meanwhile, when the Austin-based noise rock trio Exhalants faced difficulties recording their ear pounding offering Atonement (Hex Records) they were forced to take over some aspects of the record’s production with a DIY approach. At the same time, NYC’s Human Impact used the opportunity to help raise money for the cities’ COVID-19 Emergency Relief fund donating money to the charity from the release of their single “Contact,” off the band’s self-titled 2020 release on Ipecac Recording.
Enough from us, though, let’s listen to some music. You can stream all the choices below via Bandcamp, or using this Spotify playlist…
1. Speaker Music Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry (Planet Mu)
DeForrest Brown’s Speaker Music project returned this past June with a fierce and unapologetic 12-track surprise release entitled Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry (Planet Mu). The album was accompanied by a 60-page PDF booklet designed by Make Techno Black Again. Featuring “Amerikkka’s Bay” by Maia Sanaa, the album’s brilliant lead track, the PDF booklet also collects together writing from various Black theorists and poets as a way to give further context to this artist’s necessary and pointed work.
While this album is meant to pose challenging questions about race and culture, it is also “street-level fire music” burning with a passion for honoring the “modernist Black tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma.” As such, Brown’s eye to a past’s tortured history is also his means forward into a proud future. While a track like “Amerikkka’s Bay,” with Sanaa’s aching vocal delivery, is a profound expression of the sorrow that always has animated soul music, the producer’s singularly focused and futuristic rhythms on the album further fuel a new generation of Black techno.
2. Lithics Tower of Age (Trouble In Mind)
The Portland, Oregon four-piece Lithics returned in 2020 with another potent expression of post-punk minimalism entitled Tower of Age (Trouble In Mind). Following up on 2018’s Mating Surfaces (Kill Rock Stars), the band once again proves that their strategy of “less is more” is just the right weapon against a profligate culture of “more is better.” Using a clear-eyed and Imagist approach to lyrics, Lithics turn terse guitar and wire tight rhythms into electric expression on Tower of Age.
3. LEYA Flood Dream (NNA Tapes)
Harpist/vocalist Marilu Donovan and violinist/vocalist Adam Markiewicz returned this year with their brilliantly baroque project LEYA. Following up on their 2018 LP on NNA Tapes, The Fool, this year, the duo returned to the label to release their Flood Dream LP. The pair creates sumptuous sound worlds of aching beauty and unrequited desire that bring to mind Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 19th-century novel À rebours, or Against Nature.
There, an ailing and eccentric recluse named Jean des Esseinte recedes into a world of hyperaesthesic sensory experience as an escape from his disdain for bourgeoisie culture. Similarly, LEYA create glitteringly seductive music that is captivating to behold, but it also seems to offer a warning. While each detail reveals an infinite world of desire and possibility, each comes with the enervating realization that it will never entirely be fruit in hand. Hypnotic to behold and engendering the desire to possess what can never be contained, ultimately LEYA find Beauty to be a cruel task-mistress.
4. patten Aegis (555-5555)
The UK-based producer patten seems to have made quite productive use of 2020’s reclusively-inclined quarantine year! While the artist has released four albums in the last fifteen months, 2020 proper saw him putting out the three LPs GLOW, GLO))), and Aegis via his design collective 555-5555. While we were hard-pressed to pick a favorite, October’s kinetically propelled Aegis has emerged as a top listen this year.
Billed as “ten new portals” of “rogue data,” indeed, each seems to offer a doorway into a haunted London of the near future. Cutting edge rhythms and cavernous bass propel these cuts forward into a daunting nightscape, just as patten’s beguiling synth-lines act like a Siren call to explore the cities’ possibilities under cover of seductive darkness.
5. Olhava Ladoga
Olhava blends Black Metal and Shoegaze into an epic, face-melting proposition on their 2020 LP Ladoga. The project is based out of Saint Petersburg, Russia, and it is comprised of TRNA members guitarist Andrey Novozhilov and drummer Timur Yusupov. The pair’s new 9-track effort follows up on last year’s self-titled release, and like its predecessor, it was mixed and mastered by Somm-member Mikhail Kurochkin.
Ladoga‘s structure alternates briefer atmospheric tracks with massive long-form cuts. With only guitar, vocals, and drums, Novozhilov and Yusupov create staggeringly unlimited music that seems to envelop the listener in a full spectrum of frequencies all at once. From this seemingly endless wall of sound, the track’s vocals issue forth like a spectral wind. The result is music so all-encompassing that it has the fantastic ability to resolve its sonic chaos in totaling oblivion.
6. Demian Licht Die Kraft (Motus Records)
Demian Licht released her debut LP Die Kraft this past July via Motus Records. The follow-up to the techno producers’ “Female Criminals” EP trilogy, this newest work was crafted between the artist’s time in Germany and Mexico. Inspired by shamanic ceremony, Die Kraft means the ‘the force’ in German, and as a collection, it reflects the progressive structure of ritual.
Invoking ‘Ometéotl,’ the dual goddess/god of creation according to Aztec mythology, Demian Licht reflects this eternal principle in a sonic exploration of darkness and light, fragility and strength. The producer’s ability to create haunting audio environments is once again on full display here as echoing tones send out luminous flares of phosphorescent light across skittering, Footwork-like rhythms.
7. Eartheater Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin (PAN)
Eartheater‘s amazing 2020 LP Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin (PAN) found the musician returning to her guitar and voice, as well as acoustic and orchestral instrumentation, as a way to get back to the initial impulses which had fueled her musical production in the beginning. All the material on the new album was composed, produced, and arranged by the artist herself. However, the record also finds her joined by the Spanish conservatory group Ensemble de Camara and her friends LEYA, the harpist/vocalist Marilu Donovan and violinist/vocalist Adam Markiewicz.
Composed and workshopped over a ten-week artist residency (FUGA) in Zaragoza, Spain, the artist put her busy schedule recording and touring on hold to live a simpler and more rural existence during the album’s creation. The result is a singularly focused work of quiet self-reflection filled with brave inner inquiry and eerie sonic beauty.
8. Exhalants Atonement (Hex Records)
Exhalants released their sophomore LP Atonement in September via Hex Records. The Austin-based trio specializes in a virulent strain of noise rock that has drawn comparisons to titans of the genre like Scratch Acid, Cherubs, Jesus Lizard, and Unsane.
The group, comprised of guitarist/vocalist Steve Pike (Carl Sagan’s Skate Shoes), bassist Bill Indelicato (Carl Sagan’s Skate Shoes), and drummer Tommy Rabon (Body Pressure, Father Figure), began recording Atonement in their practice space during the Spring of 2020 as news of the pandemic was starting to spread. The virus would end up hampering their abilities to get into the studio, but the delay forced the band to take matters into their own hands with a DIY approach that even included assuming some of the mixing duties on the album. Their 2020 effort finds them in fine fighting form and more than willing to deal out an ear pounding.
9. Vile Creature Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm! (Prosthetic Records)
Vile Creature is an experimental two-piece doom metal band from Ontario, Canada. We first got wind of their 5-track effort Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm! with the release of their excellent 14-minute video for the album tracks of the same name–which you can view over at our 30 Favorite Music Videos of 2020. The album’s two closing tracks combined into one, the first half of the song finds Vile Creature joined by vocalist Laurel Minnes and her choir, Minuscule, with additional instrumentation from Bismuth’s Tanya Byrne. In contrast, “Apathy Took Helm” shifts gears to issue forth a furious, doom-laden onslaught against apathy and its stultifying results. This LP is a crusher!
10. Human Impact Human Impact (Ipecac Recordings)
Human Impact released their self-titled debut this March via Ipecac Recordings. The group features longstanding titans of the NYC noise rock scene: singer/guitarist Chris Spencer (Unsane), keyboardist Jim Coleman (Cop Shoot Cop), drummer Phil Puleo (Cop Shoot Cop, Swans), and bassist Chris Pravdica (Swans, Xiu Xiu). The record was produced by Spencer and Coleman and was recorded at BC Studios by Martin Bisi (Sonic Youth, John Zorn, Bootsy Collins), with additional recording done at Hoboken Recorders.
This past April, when the band premiered their video for the album track “Contact,” with proceeds going to the NYC COVID-19 Emergency Relief fund, the band explained:
“We’d like to write songs about humankind living in harmony and balance with the world, about governments and corporations being of and for the people. But those songs would be narcotic lullabies spitting in the wind of what’s real.”
