So we’re not just doing a big year-ender for movies this year! Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be churning out a few more newsletters over the winter break: Some year-enders about my music discoveries of 2021, a review or two (Licorice Pizza for sure, and maybe a couple of others), and probably something about the holidays peppered in there. If that sounds like something you’d like to receive directly into your inbox, subscribe below!
As I grapple with taking stock of the year we’ve just had as a species (as one must in exercises like this, which are just as much documents of personal and communal zeitgeist as they are strict rankings of cultural artifacts), my brain keeps pulling up a scene from The Fellowship of the Ring, of all things. For anyone who hasn’t seen The Lord of the Rings, (1) you should immediately rectify that, and (2) I apologize if the next paragraph sounds like gibberish (and am including a video of the scene in question for your reference). I promise that there is a point.
The scene is right after our heroes emerge from the Mines of Moria, with Gandalf the Grey having just sacrificed himself in battle against a Balrog to ensure their escape. While most of the party is still reeling from the loss of their comrade, the ranger Aragorn takes charge and tells everyone they must keep going, as they aren’t out of the woods yet. Boromir, who up to that point had been arguably the most difficult member of the group aside from the bumbling Pippin and Merry, implores him, “Give them a moment, for pity’s sake.”
It is a small beat that’s almost immediately papered over by Aragorn’s reasoning that they will be overrun by orcs if they linger, but I go back to it often. A common theme among those of us that revisit this series regularly is a growing affinity for Boromir as we age. He is not an easy character to love when you’re young. He is perhaps the least heroic member of the Fellowship, prone to bouts of selfishness and weakness that characters like Aragorn or Legolas seem almost free of. Most of the Fellowship is at war with the evil of the world; Boromir, more often than not, is at war with himself.
It’s only when we are older that we can appreciate that that very conflict is what makes him the most human of our nine heroes, and thus the one most like us. As a prince of Gondor (which, for those who don’t know, is right next to Mordor), Boromir has spent his entire life in the frontlines against evil; he has seen some shit. He doesn’t speak like a savior or a sage, but like someone who is simply trying to preserve those he holds dear, even as he crashes against his own limitations and the cruelties of the world again and again. Of the nine of them, he is the one best positioned to speak of failure, tragedy, and the good fight being more Sisyphean than Herculean: In other words, the human condition.
And in this moment, Boromir speaks for all of us when we ask for space to grieve.
What does all of this have to do with albums, though? Even more than last year, 2021 has felt like a year for grieving, yet it’s been difficult to pause and do so because modern life is already plenty oppressive even before you factor in the ongoing global pandemic. It is nigh-impossible for most of us to find room to give ourselves grace these days—for those ecstatic moments of catharsis and clarity where we can remind ourselves of our own humanity—but they’re still there. They exist in different nooks and crannies for each of us: For some in routine, others in new encounter. In my case, I’ve always found them in great art.
It is that very search that has informed this selection of 10 (but really 23) records. More than anything else, these albums have given me some sort of respite from the churn of life to either mourn what we’ve lost or celebrate what remains. In this music, I have found the space to breathe, and I hope you find the same. Give yourself a moment, for pity’s sake.
Anyway, enough from me. Now: The list, starting with a record that’s been my favorite from the year since it came out in February and was never really challenged for that spot…
The best album of 2021
An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, Cassandra Jenkins
“We’re gonna put your heart back together,” promises Peri, one of the many characters singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins conjures up as part of An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, a record that accomplishes the near-impossible task of capturing both what is titanic and painfully intimate about grieving, particularly in a period of history where grief seems to be the default human state. Over the course of 32 minutes, Jenkins—writing this album after the death of her friend David Berman just before they were to go on tour together—charts out a map for those who are likewise lost in their own emotional cloud-forests: 10,000 feet above sea level and seeing nothing but down. The result feels like a baptism, or something just as salvific.
Jenkins’s songs here have an impressionistic quality, weaving together a disparate collection of vignettes that are implicitly tied together by the narrative negative space they leave at the center. Save opening track “Michelangelo”, a statement of purpose where she takes on grief as head-on as any poet can, her lyrics work exclusively in the tactile, the arrangements—sparse yet lined with soaring strings and persistent drums throughout—and Jenkins’s ethereal voice imbibing them with a catharsis that is never said but always felt. Her songs ponder anger, loss, confusion, and a million roads to recovery, even as her first track admits what anyone who’s lost someone knows in their bones: It’s treatable, but not curable.
To call it the record that most captures what 2021 has felt like is almost damning it with faint praise. It feels like the kind of record we will be playing every time we lose someone, and the kind our children will be playing decades from now when they lose us. In other words, it feels timeless.
The other nine
In alphabetical order.
Any Shape You Take, Indigo De Souza
It’s fitting that many of Indigo de Souza’s songs on Any Shape You Take are in the second person. More than most breakup albums, it is uniquely preoccupied with reaching out to the offscreen “you”, with attempting to diagnose where it all went sideways and how—hope against hope—things could still be saved. It is a portrait of self-destruction told in desperate attempts at preservation, as dulcet as any great melody while also unafraid to be as cacophonous as a hurricane when it’s called for (see: “Real Pain”). Even as this is an album about the ending of things, it’s also an auspicious introduction to one of indie rock’s fastest-rising young artists. Get in on the ground floor while you can.
Blue Weekend, Wolf Alice
If this album is anything to go by, the demise of guitar rock has been greatly exaggerated. Wolf Alice’s Blue Weekend is a roaring and rambunctious lightning bolt of a record, spurred by vocalist Ellie Roswell’s versatile performances and Joff Oddie’s relentless guitar. Where most artists are comfortable operating in only a handful of modes for each album, this record provides whiplash both between and within songs; when it’s not moving at the speed and ferocity of a freight train like in “Smile” (the record’s Big Single), it’s slowing down to take dead aim for the heart (“No Hard Feelings”, “Safe from Heartbreak”). It feels like the Platonic ideal of something that might have been made 40 years ago, when the music industry was still a bit like the Wild West; in 2021, it still bangs.
I Don’t Live Here Anymore, The War on Drugs
I have spent the better part of the last three years trying, on-and-off, to understand the War on Drugs, a band that has always sounded objectively great but never emotionally resonant in a way that lets me put them on a personal list like this without it feeling like lip service. It’s taken five studio albums, but with I Don’t Live Here Anymore, I’ve grown to appreciate their genius as more than just a matter of fact. Existing, much like the very best records of Wilco and Beth Orton before them, in a strange urban-Americana space in between country, electronica, and indie, I Don’t Live Here Anymore is as resistant to classification as it is disarming to the ears: A strange, ethereal, and endlessly intoxicating cocktail of beautiful melancholy.
Ignorance, The Weather Station
Many records on this list represent an attempt at capturing the spirit of a generation in turmoil, but few feel as immediate as this intimate opus from the Weather Station. Much like most of us these days, frontwoman Tamara Lindeman is preoccupied with the end of the world on Ignorance, a singer-songwriter record about the apocalypse that’s precisely as gonzo as that sounds. Where most art about the ongoing climate crisis is either dryly dour or over-the-top to the point of unintentional camp, this album captures the existential angst of trying for human connection in a dying world: The personal and political dovetailing endlessly through melody. It’s “Big Yellow Taxi” writ large; Joni Mitchell would be proud.
Inside (The Songs), Bo Burnham
It’d be hypocritical of me to leave off my most-listened album of 2021. More valuable perhaps as an unsparing portrait of the creative process than as a finished work per se (think of it as the ideal distillation of the artistic delusion this year’s Tick, Tick…BOOM was also going for), Bo Burnham’s shaggy compilation of half-parody songs is both one of the finest articulations of the neurotic millennial state of mind put to song and an exquisite piece of performance art about the very same. The film itself will end up fairly high on my 2021 movies list, but the soundtrack is no slouch. If nothing else, it gave us an instant classic apocalypse song in “That Funny Feeling”, a track I for one will be playing around the fire when everything finally falls down.
Jubilee, Japanese Breakfast
A stellar addition to the illustrious “post-sad” genre—which includes masterpieces like Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud (my pick for last year’s best record) and George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord, perhaps its ur-text—Michelle Zauner’s rollicking, triumphant Jubilee begins at 100kph with “Paprika” and never really lets up. With this and last year’s pop songs 2020 (a collaborating with Ryan Galloway under the moniker BUMPER), Zauner seems to marking a new phase of her work as an artist, now operating in a space where playfulness and joy can exist as the main attraction against the grace notes of melancholy. Few musicians are more exciting to watch right now.
Long Lost, Lord Huron
Longtime readers (all three of you) know that we love the yeehaw music over here at La Loma Film Review, particularly the neo-country flavor employed here by Lord Huron’s Long Lost. Filled to the brims with jangles and slides, the music is closer to Marty Robbins or Ricky Nelson than any living, breathing musical comparison, and yet its grace notes betray the strategic ways in which it lets modernity peer through its 50s-era facade—almost Paris, Texas-esque in its mishmash of chronological sensibilities. It is a record that seems to exist in its own pocket of time: Certainly not of the present, but not quite a blast from the past. One might be tempted, then, to say it could be beamed from the future; I would not be opposed.
Queens of the Summer Hotel, Aimee Mann
“Aimee Mann does a musical” feels like a hook designed especially for me, but Queens of the Summer Hotel has a lot more than that going for it. Meant as the songs for a yet-to-be-scheduled stage musical adaptation of Girl, Interrupted, the album makes a case for Mann remaining one of our great chroniclers of modern emotional idiosyncrasy: The messy ways in which we crash into and ricochet against each other and even ourselves, our jagged corners scratching every which way. In her eloquent songs, being human is ramshackle, profound, and painfully real.
Voyage, ABBA
Perhaps second only to the Beatles in being responsible for shaping the music of today, Swedish megastars ABBA could have coasted on their laurels forever, their legacy wholly secure and even galvanized every time someone in the world tees up “Dancing Queen” at a karaoke bar. Nevertheless, Voyage, their first record in 40 years, is simultaneously quintessential ABBA and proof positive that they could still exist at the vanguard of pop if they wanted to. From keenly-realized ballads about aging and married life to Irish jigs (!!) and Christmas songs (!!) about lost loves, the album plays like a lexicon of the themes and tropes modern pop is built on, a thesaurus ABBA has no small role in codifying yet is somehow able to make new once more here. They didn’t have to go this hard, and yet they did. We should be grateful.
EP Corner
A quick shout-out to three EPs that I decided to not make eligible for the main list but are nonetheless charming in very distinct ways: Molly Lewis’s The Forgotten Edge, Fresh’s The Summer I Got Good at Guitar, and Miggie Snyder’s Beginning. An accomplished whistler, Lewis captures the crystalline quality of her craft in her 18-minute record, a barebones affair that spotlights her one-of-a-kind skills and makes the case for a niche art. You could make the case that Fresh’s record accomplishes much of the same, with its rambunctious, almost unpolished British-Invasion guitar sound palpably distinct from the Haims or Sleater-Kinneys of the world*. Meanwhile, Snyder’s record isn’t nearly as outre as the other two, but there’s a ton of replay value in listening to a nascent artist begin to find their voice. It’s more than a little reminiscent of Carly Rae Jepsen’s Tug of War, which if you know me at all, is quite the compliment.
*Author’s Note: I love both of these bands; both styles are great.
Honorable Mentions
The Ballad of Dood & Juanita, Sturgill Simpson
Between the Richness, Fiddlehead
CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, Tyler, the Creator
Cool Dry Place, Katy Kirby
Heaux Tales, Jazmine Sullivan
The Marfa Tapes, Jack Ingram | Miranda Lambert | Jon Randall
Romantic Images, Molly Burch
star-crossed, Kacey Musgraves
Valentine, Snail Mail
Vulture Prince, Arooj Aftab
Next up: My favorite songs of 2021. Did I miss anything you enjoyed on this list? Did I include anything you despised? Sound off!