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Favorite Albums of the Decade: #50-1

  • Writer: Jon
    Jon
  • Jan 11, 2020
  • 18 min read

#50 - Nothing Feels Natural / Priests

"A puppet show in which you're made / to feel like you participate / sign a letter, throw your shoe, vote for numbers one or two"




#49 - Big Red Machine / Big Red Machine

"Clad in ballads, wine and orchids / Cause I know the kind you seek / You used to lay down all around me / you used to lay it all by me"



#48 - Historian / Lucy Dacus

"I feel no need to forgive, but I might as well / but let me kiss your lips so I know how it felt"



#47 - There's No Leaving Now / The Tallest Man on Earth

"Why are you drinking again, Little Brother / When your rambling’s the hard part of loving you / You say the creek and that fog wants to drown you / But there are deeper of wells where we’re going to"



#46 - I See You / The xx

"25 and you're just like me / is it our nature to be stuck on repeat? / Another encore to an aftershow / Do I chase the night or does the night chase me?"



#45 - Hozier / Hozier

"When, my, time comes around / Lay me gently in the cold dark earth / No grave can hold my body down / I'll crawl home to her"



#44 - Freedom / Amen Dunes

"Pride destroyed me man / And I didn't know the deal / I said, "I'm sad I'm gonna cry / Scaring the devil in me"



#43 - The Age of Adz / Sufjan Stevens



#42 - Foil Deer / Speedy Ortiz

"Naw, you never knew me, man, not even a fraction / You just glimpsed your own reflection in a gold sheen"



#41 - Fragile Reality EP / Riley Hawke

"She makes me feel like someday we'll wake up and be happy / But with you I forgot that I'm not / This could be a fragile reality"


#40 - Lemonade / Beyonce



#39 - boygenius EP / boygenius

"They say the hearts and minds are on your side / They say the finish line is in your sights / What they don't say is what's on the other side"



#38 - Shriek / Wye Oak

"Thank god I'm home / You're finally on to me / My one, my own / Despicable animal"



#37 - I Am Easy to Find / The National

"There's a million little battles that I'm never gonna win anyway / I'm still waiting for you every night with ticker tape, ticker tape"



#36 - The Idler Wheel is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords will Serve You More than Ropes will Ever Do / Fiona Apple



#35 - Major Arcana / Speedy Ortiz



#34 - Beat the Champ / The Mountain Goats



#33 - Art Angels / Grimes


#32 - Crack-Up / Fleet Foxes

"Oh, but I can hear you, loud in the center / Aren't we made to be crowded together, like leaves?"



#31 - Helplessness Blues / Fleet Foxes



#30 - Run the Jewels 3 / Run the Jewels

"You defeat the devil when you hold onto hope / 'Cause kinfolk life is beautiful / And we ain't gotta die for them other men / And I refuse to kill another human being / In the name of a government / 'Cause I don't study war no more / I don't hate the poor no more / Gettin' more ain't what's more / Only thing more is the love / So when you see me / Please greet me with a heart full / And a pound and a hug"



#29 - Shrines / Purity Ring

"Grandma, the water is rising / My boundless hair has gotten green / I'll be your swimming forest island / Bid you walk safely, safely over me"



#28 - MY WOMAN / Angel Olsen

"Everyone I know has got their own ideal / I just want to be alive, make something real / Doesn’t matter who you are or what you do / Something in the world will make a fool of you"


#27 - Teens of Style / Car Seat Headrest



#26 - Sleep Well Beast / The National

"I thought that this would all work out after a while / Now you’re saying that I’m asking for too much attention / Also no other faith is light enough for this place / We said we’d only die of lonely secrets"



#25 - In Evening Air / Future Islands

"I want to be the one to help you find those years / That you've been talking about / Dreaming of the south / And all those lost goodbyes / And all those lonely tears / You never got to cry"



#24 - Bury Me at Makeout Creek / Mitski

"So please, hurry, leave me, I can't breathe / Please don't say you love me / Mune ga hachikire-sōde / One word from you and I would / Jump off of this ledge I'm on, baby / Tell me 'Don't', so I can crawl back in"



#23 - Centipede Hz / Animal Collective



#22 - MASSEDUCTION/ St. Vincent

"There's blood in my ears and a fool in the mirror / And the bay of mistakes couldn't get any clearer / Am I thinking what everybody's thinkin'? / I'm so glad I came, but I can't wait to leave?"



#21 - Teens of Denial / Car Seat Headrest

"And if you really wanted to be kind / You'd have forgiven them a long ass time ago / And if you really wanna know how kind you are / Just ask yourself why you're lying in bed alone"



#20 - Fear Fun / Father John Misty



#19 - Be the Cowboy / Mitski



#18 - Melodrama / Lorde



#17 - Singles / Future Islands

"We've traded places times before / We were built for making love and not for war / I'm screaming, 'Fire! Fire!' / Watching from the door / I'm feeling burnt clean, under your eyes / Putting me out"



#16 - New Materials / Preoccupations

"This is where we decompose / Through rivers of radiation / For better or worse we are cursed / In the ways that we tend to be"




#15 - Strange Mercy / St. Vincent

"If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up / Well I, I don't know what"




#14 - Modern Vampires of the City / Vampire Weekend



#13 - This is Happening / LCD Soundsystem



#12 - Viet Cong/ Preoccupations

"Ice on the horizon / The skyline folding in / Nothing is beginning / Edges falling off of themselves / And the water is draining / Off the continental shelf"



#11 - Carrie & Lowell / Sufjan Stevens

#10 - Hamilton: An American Musical - Original Broadway Cast Recording

I have immensely complicated feelings towards Hamilton. I don't have much experience with musicals or with rap, but when Hamilton burst into the world in 2015, it became everybody's obsession, mine included. I listened to the album in full many times, and it served as an excellent long car ride soundtrack for my girlfriend and I. The story is great, the songs are catchy and inspiring, and it still moves me to tears, though even early on I found myself often rooting against Hamilton himself. I've always been more of a Eliza fan - Hamilton's relentless pursuit of achievement and legacy end up destroying his life and his relationships. I don't know if my read is really what we're supposed to take away from it, but it's always been more a cautionary tale for me. Either way, it was a huge part of my life in 2015, a year that saw me begin to date my girlfriend Jane, graduate college, get a job, start writing a novel, and begin the phase of my adult life. The world was scary, but we were poised to elect the first woman president and the demographics of America were beginning to shift in such a way that it seemed like we were on the great precipice of real change. Hamilton was a vision of the new America reclaiming the stories of the old, a bright beacon of hope going forward. Hamilton actually made me proud to be an American.


And then, well...2016 happened. I won't go into here all the details of my political journey in the years since, but suffice it to say that I've gone from seeing Trump's rise as some aberration to a reflection of what America has always been. The rot's soaked into our bones as a country. And the sort of liberal idea of Hamilton - in its reclamation of a man whose ideas and policies were often pretty terrible, it's washing away of the sins of forefathers, and it's great stirring hope in a country that may be too broken to be worthy of it - doesn't sit as well with me anymore.


I've listened to this album in full only about once since the election. I probably will again. The things we love can be complicated, and I still love this album. I'll never forget Jane surprising me with tickets to see Hamilton in D.C. and then taking me out to dinner at the Hamilton. I'll never forget seeing my first Broadway show and seeing Christopher Jackson stride on stage during Right Hand Man. This album has meant a lot to me for a few really pivotal years, and for that reason, it deserves this spot.



#9 - The Monitor / Titus Andronicus


This is a break-up album, turning one man's failed relationship into a metaphor for the Civil War. Yeah, a lot to unpack here. It's angry, and densely lyrical, and rich in references, and epic, and noisy, and drunkenly self-deprecating; exactly the perfect recipe for an album that 16 year old Jon would love. I sunk into this record for hours. I'd take long walks, stewing in my own sadness and anger, letting this album fill me with an undirected rage, and then, with that all built up, find some kind of catharsis. At one point, the hugely-bearded singer Patrick Stickles screams over and over again "You'll always be a loser" before ending with "and that's okay." That's okay.


Despite everything, this album made me feel that it would be okay. That whether or not I found my way out of my teen angst (spoiler alert: I did), it would be okay. That the world was filled with enough of us out there just stumbling through, that I'd find kindred spirits. A lot of the albums at the very top of my list hit me from the ages of 16-21, right when my emotions were at their strongest and my confusion about the world at its height. I think that's when music speaks to us the most.


#8 - 22, A Million / Bon Iver


I hated this album on my first listen. The same man who turned to recording music, Walden-like, in a cabin in the woods in winter after the collapse of a relationship and a band made an...electronic album? The song titles were gibberish, the music glitchy. This is not what I wanted from Bon Iver.


And yet...I kept coming back to it until I realized I loved it after all. I've always considered myself a lyrics-first kind of person (hence their importance in this particular list), but while Bon Iver does have some great lyrics...they're pretty hard to discern properly and usually take backseat to the music. 22, A Million got me and still gets me, right in the heart, even and especially when I don't quite fully understand what's being said. Bon Iver are masters of this sort of thing, and I think this is their masterpiece.


This album really connected with me during the winter of 2016/2017, when I was living at the beach house alone after the 2016 election. I loudly sobbed in bed around 3 times that winter - one from the election, one from reading a book, and the other from playing a story-focused video game. I don't cry from fiction very much, so when something does that to me, I'm going to love it with a passion. And somehow, perhaps just because of my own unstable feelings at the time, 22, A Million became the soundtrack to all the stories that made me cry.


And that's why it's all the way up here on this list.


#7 - Jet Plane and Oxbow / Shearwater


I don't think there's anyone who likes Shearwater as much as me. I don't know anyone in real life who's really even heard of this band. I saw them live on tour for this album - and it was incredible - but I had to do it alone. But I just think they're fantastic. Their lyrics are dense, poetic, keeping a eye focused towards the natural world and the environment. Lead singer and songwriter Jonathan Meiburg is an avid bird scholar (hence the name Shearwater) and also happens to have my favorite voice in music right now. Wow, I wish I could sound like him.


This particular album is a bit of a departure from Shearwater's usual output, instead turning its lyrical attention more towards the political and its musical style into something of an 80's inspired approach. It came out at the very beginning of 2016, back before everything fell apart but right when the alarm bells started going off. It's far from an overt political punk album or anything, but it captured a lot of how I felt about everything, as well as just sounding awesome. The song from which I took the lyrics for this entry directly inspired the novel I spent 2015-2016 writing, and I still can't help but get pulled back into that world when I hear it.


This album and this band deserve more love.

#6 - Run the Jewels 2 / Run the Jewels


Okay, yes, my list is...well, it's pretty white guy indie rock. I think there's a decent diversity further back there, but my taste isn't particularly wide, and this list especially is shaped by the stuff that connected emotionally to me from ages 16-26. I don't listen to much rap, and while I admire the lyricism and poetry of many of the rappers I've heard, not much connects me with me as much as Run the Jewels has.


Run the Jewels - composed of Killer Mike and El-P - hit so hard for me because they're unabashedly political, turning their scathing attention towards the people in power and holding their heads underwater. They're also goofy and winking and fun-loving and it seems, kind and thoughtful people. I can't speak well to how Run the Jewels exist in the world of rap music, but I think they're incredibly, and no other band gets me as righteously angry and inspired. And well, we need more of that for the years to come.


#5 - Animal Joy / Shearwater

"You can stand on the back of a shuddering beam / With a pistol, firing shots into the air / You could run in the blood of the sun’s hard rays / You could drive the mountains down into the bay / Or go back to the east where it’s all so civilized / Where I was born to the life / But I am leaving the life"


Here we are, back with more Shearwater. I told you I loved them. Animal Joy was released in 2012, before Jet Plane & Oxbow, and I love it just slightly more. Most of Shearwater's output is quiet, slower, more reflective, but with Animal Joy they seemed to turn up the volume and intensity and make songs that are beautifully mixed with powerful drums, guitar riffs, and all the best elements of rock music. And all of this without sacrificing their subject matter or atmosphere. It's the best thing they've done, and probably their most accessible aside from perhaps their following album.


There's not much in here explicitly about climate change, but it's a specter that's haunted us throughout this decade and will only get more worse and more obvious in the years to come. I don't think it's fully sunk in to society at large how bad it's going to get, how even if we did the best case scenario and pivoted to a more sustainable world TODAY, there's still so much that we are on track to lose anyway. If I live to be an old man, it will be in a world that's lost much of the nature world. Animals will go extinct in record numbers. Foods and plants we rely on will be infected and die out. There's so much we've already lost, even if we don't know it yet. I want to help, I want to do something, and we have to do what we can - largely attempting to restrict the real perpetrators of this mass irrevocable death, business and empire. But there also needs to be a time to grieve for the living ghosts among us. All of that's not there in Animal Joy on the surface, but it's swimming underneath, a dying whale underwater, caught in the quiet light of the moon. For one moment longer, at least, some beasts other than us can feel joy.

#4 - The Wild Hunt / The Tallest Man on Earth "Well I walk upon the river like it's easier than land / Evil's in my pocket and your strength is in my hand/ Your strength is in my hand / And I'll throw you in the current that I stand upon so still / Love is all, from what I've heard, but my heart's learned to kill / Oh, mine has learned to kill"


What can I say about this album? The Tallest Man on Earth released this collection of finger-picked Bob Dylan-esque songs back in 2010, and at the time I couldn't stand his voice. But after a few listens, he grew on me, and the album has never stopped hitting a strange emotional core for me. The music is calming, wistful, aching, and the lyrics are poetry. I can see The Tallest Man on Earth - not the man himself, but the mythical figure he conjures up - sitting on the edge of a cliff, overlooking some undisturbed stretch of nature, chronicling his stories on a beat up old guitar, singing out over the valley to no one.


It's nothing complex. Nothing special. But it makes me feel grounded, connected to the literal earth under my feet. And staring up at the trees, wondering how long we'll get to have them here.



#3 - Trouble Will Find Me / The National

"There's a science to walking through windows without you"


I spent the first half of 2013 (the spring semester of my sophomore year of college) studying abroad at the University of Manchester in England. I even wrote a whole blog about. It remains one of the most fun and inspiring things I've ever done. I loved the person I became when I traveled, when I wasn't shackled by the weight of what people already thought about me, where I could be just slightly other in a somewhat comfortable way, where I could see a world that was like my own but off-kilter, where every weekend I could go on a new adventure, where I could go to European night clubs or ride trains through beautiful landscapes or explore ancient castles or read books in gardens and parks. I loved my entire experience abroad, especially my 24 day backpacking trip through Europe.


Yet when May came around, I still hadn't visited London yet. I'd timed my trip to coincide with seeing King Lear at the Globe, and that was in May, near the end of my journey. I worried that after seeing Paris and Venice and Prague that London would feel like a disappointment. It was even especially cold and rainy on the week I was set out to go. And then The National released a new album. I downloaded it and hopped on a train.


I'll always remember walking through the streets of London in the rain, under an umbrella, the music of Trouble Will Find Me playing in my head. Melancholy songs for a melancholy journey. I loved London, and I loved this album, and it still reminds me of those days. For the past five years, I've had my share of difficulties, but I think they're closer to anxiety and fears than to the depression and sadness that characterized a lot of my younger years. I just don't feel as sad as I used to be.


But Trouble Will Find Me brings me back to that time, nineteen and feeling incredibly happy and sad at the same time, wondering what awaited me in my future and whether anyone could ever love me. I love my life now, but it's good to remember what it was like back then, to go say hi to the Jon I was when I walked the rainy streets of London.


#2 - I Love You, Honeybear / Father John Misty


This is a love album.


It's dripping in sarcasm and irony and self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement and lust and despair and bad takes. It's still a love album. You can still see the love underneath it. Later in the decade, Father John Misty got a bit too weighed down by his (not super original) big scale opinions on life and the universe, but right here, at the beginning of 2015, right as my girlfriend and I first started dating, this was were he hit his peak.


This album is funny, it's moving, it's epic, it's dumb, it's goofy...it's one person's view of one person's love, but that paradoxically makes it all the more recognizable. My love isn't like FJM's love in a lot of ways, but at the core of it, I feel the same thing he feels for his Emma. This album came along right at the start of my relationship, where the depth of feelings couldn't - shouldn't - feel relevant for someone that I just met. But I had the sense that it would, that I was listening to the soundtrack of my own feelings cast forward in time. And it didn't take long for me to find that place. I un-ironically love this album, and it's been forever entwined with my own relationship and my own ways of looking at the terrible world we find ourselves just trying to live and love in.


#1 - High Violet / The National

High Violet was released in 2010, and it's been with me this whole decade. I was 16, recently broken up with, desperate for a new identity and meaning, and I stumbled on indie music. I built myself a personality from music and books, games and films, and at the cornerstone of that self was the music of The National. They're a sad band for sad people, with a rumbly baritone voiced singer, self-deprecating lyrics, slow churning songs with somber strings, and lyrics that straddle the line between poetic and winkingly cheesy.

I love them a lot. They've never made an album that meant as much to me as High Violet this decade, though I've liked all their subsequent output. But nothing stayed with me from long drives to trumpet practice in high school, to picking up trash at a beach in Ocean City after my break-up because I thought it was suitably good-natured and depressing, to journeys to new cities and new countries, to nights alone in my bed feeling any combination of things, to playing these songs as I taught myself guitar, to shouting and singing with a crowd full of strangers at several shows, to graduating and falling in love and forming a new life for myself. High Violet has been there all the way, and I'm not tired of it. It's about love and life and the sadness that's at the heart of everything, but there's still enough room for triumph, for hope, for a grim smile and the arms of someone wrapping around you.


That's what I'll need to make it through the 2020s. And High Violet will still be there for me.

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