Top 10 of 2021

I’ve finally managed to put together the list of my favorite albums of 2021. I really struggled with the last two or three placements. Note to self: Just start earlier next year, ok?

I’ll issue the usual caveat that my tastes lean toward Americana, alt-country, and other rootsy styles. But there’s some other fun stuff here this year.

10. From Dreams to Dust, The Felice Brothers – This is an album built for me. I first fell for “To-Do List,” which is little more than an idiosyncratic to-do list sung in Ian Felice’s idiosyncratic register. How can you not LOVE a song with lyrics like this?

Wash all the pots and linens
Find a psychoanalyst
Go to the bank and deposit checks
Sweep up the shattered dish

Return everything that I’ve borrowed
Change all the bloody gauze
Buy a spinach-colored dinner jacket
Defy all natural laws

Oooooooh, cancel Better Homes & Gardens
Oooooooh, admire Gothic arches

And, oh, there’s the zaniness of “Inferno” and “Jazz on the Autobahn,” too. Surrender to it, ok? Just surrender.

9. Play Loud, The Record Company – Far too underappreciated, IMHO, was the new album from the veteran blues rockers The Record Company. Chris Vos’s vocals drew me in—and didn’t let go. These are songs (especially, say, “Gotta Be Movin’” and “Lady Lila”) made for radio, heavy on hooks and tunefulness. I didn’t actually hear the songs on the radio, and that’s a shame. Can we make that happen?

8. Pins and Needles by Natalie Hemby – Hemby is an accomplished songwriter and one of the Highwomen. Her first solo album, Puxico, was a treat, but Pins and Needles surpasses it. When I first heard “New Madrid,” a song about lost love that productively(!) uses the name/metaphor of the famous American fault line to make its points, I was pretty much stunned. Not only is it smart, but it’s damn catchy, surely one of the songs of the year for me. Be sure also to check out the oh-so-wry “Hardest Part About Business.”

7. Hayes Carll’s You Get It All – Carll has been at the top of the singer-songwriter/Americana game for more than a decade. His KMAG YO-YO made my Top 10 list in 2011, for gosh sakes. This set of songs is as smart, polished, and adult as any of his career. So many good stories! In “Nice Things,” God isn’t thrilled with what we’ve done with her creation. The protagonist of “Help Me Remember” is losing memory and identity. “To Keep from Being Found” has an ex on the run. Maybe the most fun of all: a duet with Brandi Clark (“In the Mean Time”).

6. -io by Circuit des Yeux – Circuit des Yeux is Chicago experimental musician Haley Fohr. On -io, her sixth as Circuit des Yeux, Fohr layers her baritone in a lush orchestral setting. The album was sparked by Fohr’s grief over the death of a close friend and her subsequent artistic residency near a sad Florida beach. And, hey, then there was the pandemic. Naturally enough, all that trauma comes through in the songwriting. Were it not for Fohr’s otherworldly sound, the result might be emotionally overwhelming. But you can’t help but feel like you’re in some . . . radically new place when you listen to -io. That’s liberating. Try: “Dogma” and “Neutron Star.”

5. New Fragility, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – In its not-so-kind review of New Fragility, Pitchfork said the album spoke to “a world of divorce, substance abuse, callous indifference to murder, and also bittersweet nostalgia for that bygone indie-rock era that gave [CYHSY vocalist Alec Ounsworth] a platform in the first place.” That just sounds to me like Ounsworth is alive in the world—and has something to say. And with Ounsworth’s vocals as quirky and refreshing as ever, that’s a very good thing. Start with “Thousand Oaks” and “Where They Perform Miracles.”

4. Black to the Future, Sons of Kemet – Sons of Kemet made my Top 10 list three years ago for its brilliant Your Queen Is a Reptile. I praised the quartet’s “sideways palette,” calling out the unusual sax/tuba/percussion/percussion configuration. That combination is as compelling as ever, but I’m drawn even more this time to Theon Cross’s stellar tuba work. At times, Cross’s tuba is a steady guide; at other times, it’s the star, adding unpredictability and dissonance. Swoon. And with this set of songs—a set that focuses, importantly, on the continuing, ever-necessary Black struggle against oppression—the quartet is ably joined by an array of guests (including Philly’s Moor Mother). Standouts: “Pick Up Your Burning Cross” and “Throughout the Madness, Stay Strong.”

3. Daddy’s Country Gold by Melissa Carper – Carper practices what you could call “traditional” country, but the “tradition” here is really a pre-Tammy Wynette or even pre-Kitty Wells one. Carper sounds like a 40s-era jazz singer—her ever-present bass helps here—who fell in love with hillbilly sounds. Swoon. And the songs on Daddy’s Country Gold are downright charming. Standouts: “Would You Like to Get Some Goats?” and the LGBTQ-friendly “Old Fashioned Gal.”

2. My People by Cha Wa – The band Cha Wa exults in both New Orleans’s brass-band and Mardi Gras Indian traditions. And there’s some serious 1970s-level funk on My People. It starts with the startlingly good title track, an ode to the city’s remarkable . . . perseverance. That sounds serious, and, at some level, it is. But My People is also a party. You don’t have to know New Orleans to understand how to live—at the same moment—with both the awful and the joy. But it probably helps. Anyway, this was the dose of New Orleans I needed to get through an awful year. Also: “Wildman” and “Second Line Girl.”

1. Eddy de Pretto’s À Tous Les Bâtards – I don’t understand French well enough for an album like this to be my favorite of the year. Yet here we are: I fell hard for À Tous Les Bâtards. As this New York Times article describes, de Pretto traffics in a chanson-inflected hip hop. It’s infectious. The voice here is BIG. And even for an English-only Neanderthal like me, it’s easy enough to follow along (especially after listening to the album for months on end). These are smart, playful gay-centered songs. Plus, de Pretto sings the hell out of them. You might start with “Désolé Caroline” or “Bateaux-Mouches,” but the entire album deserves your serious attention. Highly, highly recommended.

Honorable Mentions: The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, Valerie June; Sturgill Simpson’s The Ballad of Dood & Juanita; NOW, Damon Locks Black Monument Ensemble; Adia Victoria’s A Southern Gothic; MONTERO by Lil Nas X; Georgia Blue, Jason Isbell; J.T., Steve Earle and the Dukes; Aimee Mann’s Queens of the Summer Hotel; The Million Things That Never Happened, Billy Bragg; La Santa Cecilia’s Quiero Verte Felix; Thilda Bøes Legat, Tønes; Sean Rowe’s The Darkness Dressed in Colored Lights; Stand for Myself, Yola; Local Valley, José González; I’ll Meet You Here, Dar Williams; Charley Crockett’s Music City USA; Cazador de Ostras by Teitur; Last of the Better Days Ahead, Charlie Parr; Benoît Delbecq’s The Weight of Light; Be Here Instead by Parker Millsap; Rosegold, Ashley Monroe; Seek Shelter, Iceage; Going Up, Snorre Kirk & Stephen Riley; St. Lenox’s Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for our Tumultuous Times; Jeb Loy, Jeb Loy Nichols; Gary Allan’s Ruthless; Shaw: Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, Caroline Shaw & So Percussion; and JP Harris’s Don’t You Marry No Railroad Man.