I wasn’t going to add my voice to the many others who crowd the end of each year with their evaluations of the new music released in 2019. But here I am, doing just that.
I have a strong aversion to quantifying art. While I loved all of the Top Ten lists in the movie High Fidelity, I struggle with the practice of making them. They seem so … American. We have this urge to turn people and things and art into numbers. But it’s just wrong.
Relationships can’t be quantified. Beauty can’t be quantified. Love, not numbers, are the best response to them.
So, I will resist the trend to apply numbers to any of the new music releases that I connected with in 2019. Each stands on its own as a work of art.
Bon Iver — i,i
Ever since I heard “Skinny Love,” downloaded from some long-forgotten indie music blog months before the album For Emma, Forever Ago was released, Bon Iver quirky falsetto has had the ability to touch emotions within me few others can touch. The ache. The longing. The yearning for something, for someone just beyond reach. Even the odd exchange in the recording studio with which the album i,i begins with its bursts of noise draws me in. And as it blends into the second track “i M i,” I’m captivated. The beauty of “Holyfields.” The shame of “Hey, Ma.” They express feelings more than ideas. And that’s the key to Bon Iver. Justin Vernon has always been something of an Impressionistic artist. His vocals are hard to follow. And reading the lyrics doesn’t help much, as he drops seemingly unrelated phrases, creating a pastiche of words and sounds and feelings. The 28-page large-scale book included with the vinyl release of the album includes a collection of photos and photo collages, each also adding their artistic impressions and doing so as obliquely as the album’s lyrics. This merely underscores the need to allow this album to bypass the rational mind and engage purely with the emotional. As Vernon sings in “Naeem,” “I can hear, I can hear, I can hear crying. I can hear crying.”
The Ocean Blue — Kings and Queens, Knaves and Thieves
I’ve held The Ocean Blue in highest esteem ever since hearing their song “Ballerina Out of Control” from their second album, Cerulean, back in 1991. The release of Kings and Queens, Knaves and Thieves in 2019 comes 30 years after the release of The Ocean Blue’s eponymous first album. After a 15-year gap since their last tour in Oregon, I was so glad to catch them in Portland with my oldest son. Over the three decades The Ocean Blue has been writing songs, they have grown and yet there is a consistency to their sound and their upbeat tunes with melancholy themes that holds their oeuvre together. Each song shimmers and aches at the same time. The title song ends with, “Breathe my last/And depart and go where/I know not/The black hole beyond/All of space and of time/Kings and Queens/Knaves and Thieves/Priests and Plebs/Share in the same fate.” Singer/guitarist David Schetzel is able to croon sad songs to happy melodies in a way that makes that contradiction work. There’s an honesty to his eyes wide to the pain in the world lyrics that is matched with a hopefulness that good will prevail in the end evinced in his music. That interplay between honesty and hopefulness matches a belief that no matter how bad things get, God is still at work in the world.
Death Cab For Cutie — The Blue EP
After the reemergence of Death Cab For Cutie with their 2018 release Thank You For Today, the band couldn’t hold off on a quick, brief 2019 release. When you get your mojo back, it’s best to let it loose. And so Ben Gibbard and company dropped a handful of songs, two of them with the word “blue” in their titles, on The Blue EP. Gibbard continues to battle his disbelief in God on the EP, as he has on other releases. And it’s obvious this wrestling match isn’t over.
Vampire Weekend — Father of the Bride
After three incredible albums, each one better than the one before, Vampire Weekend took a break. And following the bleakness of Vampires in the City, with its heart-wrenching expression of a loss of faith, a break was in order. One member departed the band and another tried his hand at some solo tunes. Meanwhile, band leader Ezra Koenig spent time getting happy again. And that renewed happiness is so evident in this collection of songs. Drawing from different genres that don’t usually sit side-by-side on the same album, Vampire Weekend makes them work. Like The Ocean Blue, there’s that odd mix of lyrical honest about darkness in the world that’s contradicted by happier tones.
Kanye West — JESUS IS KING
It’s a rare thing for any of my kids to text me about a new album dropping. But to hear from all four of them on a single day and the same album is unheard of. But that’s what happened with Kanye released JESUS IS KING. And one of my boys was in Mexico at the time. Blending his standard genius rap with the gospel choirs of his Sunday Services, Kanye turned so many heads I think the music world got whiplash. The signs of the coming of this album have all been there from the beginning of his career and through his ego-maniac rants and heart-felt confessions and yet we were all caught off-guard. There is a wisdom and humility (though not completely, this being Kanye after all) and theological acuity that is surprising on this album. He doesn’t ignore tension, noting that the ones who will judge him most are other Christians. Even so, the songs are brief and at the end of the half-hour run time, I felt lifted up.
I won’t call these albums the Top Five of 2019. But they are each great in their own ways, sharing beauty and filling my heart. And that’s why I push past my reticence with lists and share them with you.