2024 in Music

Robert Layton began his survey of Beethoven’s Late Quartets for GRAMOPHONE magazine with some words to live by: “The real criterion of the quality of any recording is not so much how much one admires it but rather how often one returns to it.”

I’ll probably drop a line or so early in the new year.

1. Kali Uchis – ORQUÍDEAS
2. SZA – S.O.S. – DELUXE: LANA
3. Aphex Twin – SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS VOLUME II and MUSIC FROM THE MERCH DESK (2016-2023)
4. Dirty Three – LOVE CHANGES EVERYTHING
5. Cuarteto Casals – SHOSTAKOVICH: COMPLETE STRING QUARTETS
6. Gruff Rhys – SADNESS SETS ME FREE
7. Kim Gordon – THE COLLECTIVE
8. Nicolas Jaar – PIEDRAS I & II
9. Merce Lemon – WATCH ME DRIVE THEM DOGS WILD
10. Cassandra Jenkins – MY LIGHT, MY DESTROYER
11. Jessica Pratt – HERE IN THE PITCH
12. The Danish String Quartet – KEEL ROAD
13. Ezmeralda – RUIDO Y FLOR
14. Fennesz – MOSAIC
15. Gastr Del Sol – WE HAVE DOZENS OF TITLES
16. Belong – REALISTIC IX
17. Kim Deal – NOBODY LOVES YOU MORE
18. Mahmoud Ahmed – ENGEDAYE NESH
19. Jeff Parker – THE WAY OUT OF EASY
20. Milan W. – LEAVE ANOTHER DAY
21. Actress – Д​а​р​е​н Д​ж​. К​а​н​н​і​н​г​е​м
22. Jim White & Marisa Anderson – SWALLOWTAIL
23. Laetitia Sadier – ROOTING FOR LOVE
24. Khruangbin – A LA SALA
25. Blur – LIVE AT WEMBLEY

It’s easy to forget how young the album is. Go through the r&b or pop section of your local used record store and you’ll find, especially among titles by artists made throughout the fifties and early sixties records that look like pint-sized singles collections–half songs you recognize, the other half maybe not so much. Because that’s pretty much what they were. In a market where radio play made the star, the need for a concept was pretty low. There are plenty of great ones, to be sure, but they’re largely exceptions to the rule. Most are just a few a-sides padded out with their respective b-sides. By the late fifties artists like Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, and Sam Cooke, were making albums that that laid the groundwork for the modern concept album–more on that in a minute. By the late sixties single still dictated star power, but alongside it the studio album had become the defining factor of “the artist”.

[SCENES MISSING: SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER opens the door for the movie soundtrack as we still know it, MTV makes the music video a household promotional juggernaut, the compact disc pretty much kills the single as a consumer product, FM radio doesn’t quite die but is nonetheless a zombie of its former self, the culture of mix tapes and burned cd mixes gives way to Napster, and the bougie vinyl resurgence turns the album in, its tactile form, into a luxury item rivaled only by eggs and gasoline…Thanks Biden.]

If any of the above reads like me thinking out loud just to bring myself up to date for what I’m about to say it’s because that’s exactly what it has taken me to wrap my head around the ‘what’ of my two favorite albums from 2024. Kali Uchis’ album ORQUÍETAS was released twice this year–the second time a few songs were added, but by then it was already the best thing I’d heard in 2024. And by then its identity was already fully formed. S.O.S. was released for the first time in December 2022, (with the single, ‘Good Days’ dating back to 2020) a cavalier clearinghouse following 2017’s CTRL–and five years of My Bloody Valentine-scale anticipation. SZA spent the time punching up other people’s singles and living the kind of life only SZA could live. You should see her on HOT ONES. Anyway, by the time S.O.S. – DELUXE: LANA came out it was both five years in the making and released twice, over the course two years, in two strikingly different versions…that have come to a rest (for now) as an album. ¹

1. To get some better insights into the industry side of this formatting phenomenon I highly recommend Paul A. Thompson’s review of Migos’ CULTURE III for PITCHFORK https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/migos-culture-iii. ↩︎