Now I’ve established that my excel file of music has the chronological order of buys rather than being ordered alphabetically (at least for the latest buys), I think I can revert to the original idea of ‘tunes listened to in year xxxx’ rather than just ‘released’. Which means I might have to amend 2021 too but hey-ho.
Anyway, I think 2019 started well musically so probably mentally too. Thinking about it right now, I don’t actually feel I remember much significant about 2019. Although I think it’s when things gradually turned worse and the push/pull ‘games’ became very testing. The appearance of ‘better supply’ combined with my own flaws starting to alter a relationship that had stabilised (though I was making all these mistakes and it really was my own fault, thinking now I don’t think I felt able to free myself then and do what I truly wanted to do). In a way, it was the last mostly peaceful if uneven year of that era for me, I see it now (while nearly down the page and coming back to update this summary) while reviewing my tracks of the year. Anyway, let’s focus on the good music.
Plenty of actual good albums at the start, that make it not necessarily easy to pick up a single track out of (very often a couple were great), but they accompanied me intently then.
Starting with The Twilight Sad: VTr. It Won/t Be like This All the Time is an excellent album. They supported The Cure in 2016 (but I actually don’t remember them, think we missed the support with John while drinking away and I was far too drunk then anyway) and ever since, but it’s only when they released this (their first album since) that I paid attention until I worked my way through their discography later. Anyway this was part of the early year sountrack, and this song particularly stuck in my mind.
Better Oblivion Community Center : Sleepwalkin’ (Daydreamin’ version). I saw Conor Oberst had a new album out, with Phoebe Bridgers (who I’d not heard of at the time) so had a quick listen. Dylan Thomas and Sleepwalkin’ are the standout tracks off this excellent record. But this version here, released much later in the year as a single, has a different take, slightly more upbeat and I loved it instantly too.
Albums…
Boy Harsher: Fate. A little dose of electronica there, and another excellent album (Careful). I’d missed that sort of music, enjoyed the hypnotic sounds. This track particularly ‘haunted me’, but there’s quite a few other tracks that tickled my fancy. To mention only another one, Lost is fabulous. Check also ‘Send me a Vision’ from the Country Girl Uncut EP released later in the year.
Cherry Glazerr: Daddi. Plenty of bands discovered just in the first month of 2019 (compare with the void that 2023 feels it’s been so far, one quarter into the year). A rock band this time, not their first album, but excellent throughout (you’ll see it made my top 5, which is heavily leaning towards the start of the year). This song was great, as was the closer Distressor, among others.
Lust For Youth: Great Concerns. Now, the album was released a little later in the year (June?), but this track was available well ahead of that and it was like ‘wow!’ . At some point I was just listening to this over and over and over again. Absolutely amazing, I love it, it still makes my spine tingle. I anticipated the album so much after that, it was a relative disappointment overall when it dropped, but there’s still other tracks I grew to like on that, though this towers over it all.
Lissie: Castles. Right, now I know, I’m straying away from 2019…in fact to a 2018 release from Lissie but 2019 is when I got it, while waiting for the release of the Piano Retrospective. This beautiful song was just moving and was felt deeply. Check also Love Blows (but it may be the one I will post from the Piano album).
Billie Eilish: you should see me in a crown. Moving slightly away from tracks that marked me, because somehow the middle of the year was a bit more muddled with different things (I’m saying this just by impression left by music as I think I can very often connect my mental state with music associations and how I feel about tunes, surely it can’t just be that there was no great album), but anyway Billie Eilish’s debut album was something a bit new and different, with a distinctive voice, an artist that instantly felt important and this is probably the tune I felt attracted to the most (and another case of absolutely nothing in the lyrics I didn’t pay attention to).
Marina & The Diamonds: Bubblegum Bitch. Jumping far back in time for this (from her 2012 album Electra Heart), but this was an instant hit for me when I got it. The rhythm and delivery and I very much like her voice. And yes, MARINA (as she was known without the Diamonds by then) also actually had an album in 2019, that didn’t completely register with me at the time, but that was close to making my top 5 on the purposeful relisten for the 5 albums series: LOVE+FEAR is pretty good.
Lissie: Love Blows (Piano Version). I was looking forward to anything new from Lissie, and this year’s actual release was piano versions of existing songs (some I didn’t know at the time). Plenty of goodness on there, I enjoyed listening to the whole album several times.
The Faint: Quench the Flame. I was intrigued reading a review on Pitchfork that they still existed and this album sounded interesting. As it is, when I relistened to it for the five albums it was better than I remembered. But this track always stood out. I remember listening to it while stumbling upon a tweet that had a repetitive video pattern from an inventor of visual effects that was celebrated that day, and it seemed to fit so perfectly I was mesmerised. It reminds me just there that I had started having nights in with drinks in good weather on the balcony, enjoying twitter company and kind of feeling I was looking after someone to be there for them. So that was even before COVID then. For so long I forgot to go out in the real world, though it took me another couple of years to fully wake up. Anyway, this song is just ace, that rhythm makes me want to just type on keys in rhythm to it.
Cage The Elephant: Social Cues. From the Album of the same name. Another band I didn’t know, despite them having been around a while, but this album hit the spot instantly, and that tune in particular.
The Cranberries: All Over Now. I’d given up on them a long time ago, but read good things on this posthumous album (RIP Dolores O’Riordan), and the opening song there has a great intro with a nice Cure-ish guitar sound. There’s other good stuff on the album, but the first bars of this song always do the trick.
Yonaka: Lose Our Heads. I seem to have bought a few old compilations, good albums with no standout tracks and quite a bit from the list where nothing stayed with me. However, with Don’t Wait Til Tomorrow, Yonaka was the next album to really get me, with this song a highlight, along with Fired Up, another excellent tune. So this truly is one of my favourite tunes of 2019 and I listened to it a lot.
Ride: Jump Jet. I hadn’t got their previous post-reformation album at the time, but I got this, and a couple of tunes stayed with me: this and End Game.
Bat for Lashes: The Hunger. I’d heard of Natasha Khan aka Bat for Lashes before 2019 but somehow never got round to listening to her works, so I started with Lost Girls, released that year, superb and not far from my top 5, and this haunting song in particular is worth inclusion here.
Chromatics: Petals. I caught up with a lot of Chromatics releases in 2019. Plenty I could post, from ‘Into The Black’ (essentially a cover of Hey Hey My My from Neil Young) opening the Kill for Love album from 2012, I can Never Be Myself When You’re Around, a single from 2015 or various tracks from Night Drive. But this shortened Hole cover really caught my attention the most (and made me check the longer and differently excellent original version). I just truly wish it were longer.
Tegan and Sara: Hold My Breath Until I Die. The 5albums19 poll is still fairly fresh in my mind, so I know on relistening to the album I found it quite good, but really there was only one track that stayed with me and I listened to this one fair amount of times during the third quarter of 2019.
Sam Fender: You’re Not The Only One. A Promising hope of English music, I think he went bigger with his second album a few years later, but that didn’t quite catch me. This was slightly hyped, it’s rather good, but it’s really only this song that I kept going back to. That time of the year when days get shorter, and a twinge of sadness took over.
Electric Youth: Thirteen. Now I’m not even sure this track caught me straight at the time or if it’s a few years later, but somehow this haunting slow, dizzying dreamy track got me again and again at some point. Also it was released in August, so I guess (see also Taylor Swift) that I did catch up with a few releases from earlier in the year when the new releases were drying up a bit.
Taylor Swift: Cornelia Street. So I should have got 1989 when it was released in 2014, but somehow I was falling out of love with new music and my attention was caught elsewhere (I have got it now). But Lover was my first encounter with Taylor Swift, and I loved the album. Could easily have made my top 5 too. Anyway lots of good tracks, it was a toss up between this and Cruel Summer for selection here.
Sharon van Etten: Seventeen. Now that was a very very late catch-up as this was released at the start of the year. I think I was just checking ‘best of’ lists and this came up a lot so I gave it a go. It’s very good but really it’s this track that stuck with me a lot, so one I listened to a fair bit at the very end of the year.
Idelwild: All These Words. From earlier in the year too. I think sometimes I should go back to what I did at times: if only one or two tracks take my fancy, buy individual tracks rather than the album. So I haven’t got much time for this album overall (give me The Remote Part any day), but I found this song great and it went straight into my ‘uplifting’ playlist.
The Cure: It Can Never Be The Same (live). Ok so this had been played live in the 2016 tour, and this was played only once since, in this special 2018 concert for the Meltdown festival curated by Robert Smith, but so 2019 is where this was officially released as part of the Cureation live CDs/DVDs (there isn’t and might never be a studio version), and it’s dark, emotional and great, and I listened to it an anormous lot this year and near the end of it. It would probably work well in spirit with the unreleased (at the time of writing (typing, sometimes it annoys me to equate both…I will write a blog on writing which will explicit why, I guess though, words DO have several meanings and it’s about context, but there’s hardly any ‘writing’ left nowadays, it’s mutated)).
Now for the usual: albums that didn’t have a stand out track or didn’t register at the time of release but are actually very good or possibly excellent (same as any other year in these lists, you know the drill….except I wrote years in a certain order, but you have no reason to read these in the orders they were written…).
Nilüfer Yaya: Miss Universe. Another of these ‘I remember it is very good’, that I listened to again for the 5 albums and found very good again, yet still can’t actively remember a track unless it’s being played to me. It’s a strange phenomenon, but doesn’t stop it from being a very good album in my estimation (even if yes, it also means I have no emotional connection with it, which, as far as music is concerned, buggers me).
Ladytron: Ladytron. Only liked one or two tracks off it initially, but on re-listen for the 5 albums series, I think it’s a pretty good album after all.
Jade Bird: Jade Bird. Another excellent debut, though her second album is even (much) better in my opinion, see 2021 for it.
Fontaines DC : Dogrel. Now you could argue: why is this here, rather than in the main part with youtubes above as I made it my number one after all? Hard to say. At the time, I thought, yeah very good album, there ARE some good songs that I could connect with immediately. But oddly, it’s only on re-listening for the 5albums19 that it struck me quite how good it was. And with songs I would definitely have listened to more and posted above if the timing of the release had been different during this year. I could have revisited and posted above, but I’m mostly making it about the emotions and feelings of the year itself. Or perhaps it’s just that there was not quite a single track that went above the others (mostly because they are all very good).
Unlike for 2018, I have decided to keep those 2019-released tracks I liked but listened to in 2020 for the 2020 list, which I suspect might be huge, the main ‘COVID’ year and all that. Sure it means I’m slightly changing the way I do these pages…. but ultimately I’m sharing all the music I have loved these years, and I think it makes more sense to keep it a little more chronological, relive the year. Sure it’s more personal, but at the end I still hope someone will love some of the music I’m sharing here.
So to finish, just the usual #5albums vote. It’s only from a few weeks before I typed this page.