The Best Albums of the Decade So Far (Pt. I, 30-21).

Vita Contemplativa does the 2020s

Since I’m gonna be stepping up my output here, experimenting with what works (see my brief declaration here), I thought I might try to leaven my writings with a little bit of one particularly controversial genre which I love shamelessly—the list. Now, I would never rank a book, or a person (Sam Kriss can rest easy). But there are plenty of things which deserve their taxonomical day, and I have a lot of affection for things like year-end lists, albums-of-the-decade, or personalized lists of favorite films. What used to be a kind of folk medium, uniting genuine cinephiles with video store clerks, critics with record shop punks, before the major internet sites and blogs really took it all over. And if we’re honest, I think most of us who grew up with the internet (especially those like me, marooned in small Midwest towns), first made our way on lists. It was all that we young internet-bound kids had—our prized lists of films, records, books, wherever we could find them. Our flawed-but-magic keys to the ocean of information we had such sudden access to. Hopefully we aged out of it, as our interest grew from mere fandom to actually taking seriously this whole pretentious “art” thing (a process our culture at large has curiously reversed in this century). But the affection remains.

I admit I waffled on this one—tallying up the best records of the last five years. But then the Hindenberg Pitchfork released their list, and I felt a pang of sadness to see an institution, which was once proudly snobbish (snobbery, though odious, is always preferable to philistinism), now devolved into the worst of flattening internet tendencies: the need to be all things to all people. It’s not a terrible list, it’s just nakedly rhetorical, clearly designed to paint the site as still with it. Gone are the days when they would actually champion something truly obscure, or pan something masses of people had fallen for. Now they’re mostly brand-conscious Millennials engaged in a boring war with their very Gen-X past, while the Zoomers pass them by completely—the same fate as so much of the legacy media which was at one time considered even somewhat “cool.”

Anyways, I think there’s no shortage of brilliant music being made these days, and if making a list helps anyone find a buried gem or curio they wouldn’t have found otherwise, then it will have been worthwhile. So without any further delay, Vita Contemplativa begins its countdown of the best records of this decade so far… (Part I)

30. Suite for Max Brown Jeff Parker

Not just our premier jazz/experimental guitarist, Parker’s one of the only current jazz musicians who can bend anything—R&B, Hip-Hop, sampling, looping—into his own thing, which is still in some abstract capacity Jazz. Much of the album is loping and repetitive, the songs are short and rely more on ideas than composition. The improvisation is baked-in, not necessarily the point of it, since the point is more groove than anything. But the record would make this list even if its sole track was the 10-minute finale “Max Brown,” maybe the best and most memorable single instrumental I’ve heard from a jazz musician in years.

29. GUTS Olivia Rodrigo

I’ll give you the ballads—maudlin, ridiculously overblown. I’ll give you the musical theater moments—painful. But when she’s sneering, rasping, bitchy, or snarling, I start to see flickers of the kind of star who actually deserves the wild success Rodrigo has attained. The kicker is how much actual input she clearly has on how the music feels. Cause unlike almost all big pop, from Jack Antonoff’s airless recipe to the hyper-compacted compression of the Dr. Luke/Max Martin school—the anthems on this record actually sound good. Not too over-produced; dynamic, not flattened out. Somehow this gal managed to hole up for two albums, not with a small army of contributors, but one dedicated producer, and was able to make the music she wanted to make, while reaching one of the largest audiences imaginable. It’s not The Beatles, but it’s good enough for now. And it turns out she’s a solid enough hook-writer she can get about 7 or 8 memorable rock numbers across on one album—a ratio that practically pole vaults over the competition. And “love is embarrassing”? Textbook pop song-craft, in under 3 minutes.

28. Lucky for You Bully

One of the few observable trends in actually-indie rock over the last five years has been a clear changeover from 80s revival to 90s. Since indie kids tend to form bands and make music that sounds like the shit they grew up with, this was probably inevitable. But rarely do they get it as right as Alicia Bognanno. It’s really a shame she wasn’t born earlier: drop this record in 1997 and she might’ve been as big as Third Eye Blind or The Goo Goo Dolls. Hell, “Change My Mind” is a better Foo Fighters song than anything Dave Grohl ever wrote. And if Lucky for You isn’t quite as great as Bully’s earlier, rawer records, it’s still huge and infernally catchy. If there was any justice in the world, this heroic and totally underrated swing for the stadium fences would’ve made them one of the biggest bands in America.

27. Because of a Flower Ana Roxanne

Ambient music is hard to make interesting. It takes a special touch. A sixth sense for memorable sounds, for confluences of instruments that catch at the ear, without jarring it. While not strictly ambient, Ana Roxanne’s only solo album is still one of the most beguiling examples of the fact that I’ve heard—she has an unerring sense for when to slide in a new sound, when to hold on, when to shift into her own (beautiful) voice, or when to simply let the background overcome the tinkling and pulsing synths she’s set as the song’s bed. It’s electronic music that is as warm, living, and tactile as possible—at times it’s Music For Airports, if that record had featured a Filipino-American woman trained in both Western choral and traditional Hindustani singing (and bearing the legendary Mills College seal of approval). It’s about as healing and human as electronic music can be.

26. Boat Songs MJ Lenderman

Though he’s quickly become every Gen X rock dad’s favorite young songwriter, the secret to MJ Lenderman’s success is not so much his sense of humor or his pithy lyrics—the kind of cleverness that gets music critics into all kind of adverbial jerk-offs. It’s Americana plain and simple. The guy is unfussy, loves his steel guitar player, has no compunction about reworking old standards into his own takeoffs: he’s living out a personal tradition. And at its best—like the Jimmy Webb rewrite “TLC Cage Match," the honky funk of “You Have Bought Yourself a Boat,” or the absolute transcendental lift-off that is “You are Every Girl to Me”—Boat Songs is as good as old school singer-songwriting gets these days.

25. Ticket to Fame Decisive Pink

The side-project of former Dirty Projector Angel Deradoorian and the Russian electronic wiz Kate NV, Decisive Pink flew completely under the radar two years ago. But their one album, Ticket to Fame, is wonderful. One of the most important and underrated electronic musicians we have, Kate NV approaches electronic music a bit like a playground, and it’s her unmistakable flight of samples and sounds that undergirds the whole project. But though it’s happening in her peculiar universe, Deradoorian ends up being a perfect partner. Both clearly get a kick out of Brian Eno, David Byrne, and Krautrock. More than anything they manage to summon something that feels like a funny, bleary, analog journey through a sleek twenty-first century city. The subjects are up to date, but there’s a clunky charm to the music—there’s nothing else quite like it.

24. Two-Star and the Dream Police Mk.gee

It’s a terrible title, sure. But the music is irresistible. God keep me from trying to slather it with adjectives, though it’s hard not to. Like Jai Paul before him, the mysterious Mk.gee is committed to a very warped, very vague mode of throwback pop. Like so much music these days, it sounds like nothing so much as a memory of another era’s music. Shades of Peter Gabriel, Prince, even certain Lindsey Buckingham licks, surface from time to time. And he really is a stunning guitarist—with his small fleet of pedals he’s one of the few players since Kevin Shields to make the guitar sound like something new. Sometimes it’s so processed it’s almost a synthesizer itself. But the hooks keep coming and coming, before fading into the murkiness again, and the memorable melodies across the album are too numerous to count. Who knows—it may end up becoming some kind of classic.

23. Past Lives (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Christopher Bear, Daniel Rossen

Though it might be the best film soundtrack since Jonny Greenwood’s Phantom Thread score, Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen’s accompaniment to Celine Song’s Past Lives is the rare soundtrack that works perfectly well as an album. I’m mostly in the camp that considers the film to be a likely future classic (it’s been pretty unfairly underrated by people who can’t tell A24 movies apart), much of which I think has to do with the music. The effect remains when you listen to it alone—sparkling instrumentals, part acoustic and part electric, returning to and turning over its slight motifs in ways that wouldn’t sound out of place on some of the studio records on this list. There are small droning organs and wind chimes; a rotating array of synths, pianos, strings, brushed drums. Like the film it accompanies, there’s something unmistakably now to it—but just what, I have yet to figure out.

22. Pompeii Cate Le Bon

I would hold up Le Bon’s previous record, 2019’s Reward, as one of the 3 or 4 best albums of the last decade; if it snuck onto this list, it would probably sit at #1. It’s one of the most perfect records of this century—impeccably arranged, airtight, and composed, like every last note and sound was minutely weighed and carefully decided on. Though Pompeii may not be quite as consistent, it’s still a great continuation of a definitive method, pushing Le Bon at times into an even sleeker, catchier direction. Much has been made of the way she once took time off from her music career to study furniture-making, retiring to a small cottage in her native Wales—what’s left out is how her music seemed to reflect it afterwards. There are obvious influences (Eno and Bowie, mostly) but her music is increasingly happening in her own precisely-upholstered world, and her world only. The key, I think, is a sense of decoration and space: her music tilts away from most comparable contemporary sounds, treating each element—xylophones, saxophones, bell-like guitars, her own peculiar voice—as ornaments in air, while her lyrics remain abstract and ultimately private. Because you almost have to overhear her to get her, she’ll never be as big as she deserves. But those who bother to try will find that she’s become one of our best living songwriters.

21. Untitled (Rise) SAULT

The best of the many mysterious albums by the world’s most mysterious collective. Study the title: “officially” it doesn’t have one; “unofficially” though, it does. As if that would be the title, if they could disclose exactly who they are. They’ve since let in a little light, even staging an apparently astonishing performance in November of last year. And of course there’s much talk about their apparent chic-ness and “radicalism,” which the listener has to wade through the same way they wade through the album’s flashier or preachier interludes. But none of that matters when you actually get to the music. On Rise the group sounds especially enormous, cycling easily through genres, mixing Disco orchestras with West-African percussion, American Soul and British Dub, touching on Gospel, Breakbeat, Funk, Afrobeat. The glue is the constant, impeccable groove—it can switch up dramatically several times in a given song, but it always comes back to carry it through to the next. Someone once said that a good groove extends to infinity. On Rise SAULT practically gives a dissertation on the history of groove, and at times it sure does feel close to infinite.

Vita Contemplativa will be back next week—hopefully shaking it up again with a more literary post next Monday or Tuesday, before following it next Friday with Part II of this album countdown. Thanks again for sticking around, folks.