It’s that laborious time of year again when insufferable music geeks pen floridly overwritten lists of their favorite music of the year. Given my vocational past as an on-again/off-again erstwhile “music journalist” of very dubious legitimacy, I’ve done my own such round-ups over the past fifteen plus years here on Flaming Pablum. By the same token, as an aging, middle-aged dad with an expanding waistline and a contracting vista of open-mindedness, I have also recused myself, on occasion, from said proceedings at various points, believing I didn’t have anything credible to offer, that year, to the larger discussion. One might assume that 2020 being what it was (and still is for another three weeks), I might choose to sit out this particular year. But one would be mistaken.
While my list of 2020 favorites is far from unwieldy or sprawling, I did find a clutch of new albums that I duly latched onto. If I’m being honest, however, I’d suggest that the music that I listened to most, this year, was recorded well in advance of 2020. I was particularly besotted with a bootleg of a Black Flag show in July of 1982 called Live At the On-Broadway, capturing the band as an incendiary five-piece with Henry on vocals, Dez Candena on second guitar and the mighty Chuck Biscuits on drums. I played the bejeezus out of that.
But, in keeping with the premise, herewith my top five favorite songs from my top five favorite albums of 2020. You may beg to differ with some and/or all of it, and that’s fine. Make your own damn list, then.
And here we go....
5. “Consequences” by Human Impact
As documented back on this ancient post, I was really wrestling, back in March, with the notion of going to see this band play Brooklyn’s disarmingly intimate metal club, St. Vitus. A veritable supergroup comprised of former members of The Unsane, SWANS and, indeed, Cop Shoot Cop, Human Impact is a band that is almost tailor-made to my particular tastes. That all said, when the show was looming, so also was the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the concept of cramming into a tiny, sweaty rock club to stand in worrying proximity with a couple of hundred other people seemed like an irresponsible prospect, at the time. In short, I opted out, but the show happened anyway. Oh well.
A few weeks later, a copy of their eponymous debut disc arrived in my mailbox. If truth be told, the prescient nature of the band’s pointedly dour lyrics concerning global tumult, political insurrection and — yes, do wait for it — disease were just a little too close to the current affairs of the day, so I sorta put off listening to it as much as I might have otherwise. Further Human Impact singles only turned out to be even more doomily prophetic. In any case, while the band’s music continues to retain all the cheer of a concrete slab to the face, I did warm to this particular track. Buckle up.
4. “The Ground Below” by Run the Jewels
There was indeed a time when I was credibly enthused and summarily versed in contemporary hip-hop. While that time is now largely in the past, I am still relatively up to speed on at least the names of the artists currently helming the trajectory of the genre. Nine times out of ten, however, I find most of what passes for contemporary hip-hop to be roundly uninspired and/or flat-out depressing. I pine for the fiery rhetoric and busy production of Public Enemy, the fanciful wordplay and jazzy groove of A Tribe Called Quest and the effortlessly cool style of the Beastie Boys, but too much of the music of today’s crowd leaves me cold and clammy. I can’t summon any enthusiasm for folks like the seemingly ubiquitous Drake, the mumble-rap idiots like Lil Xan and Lil Pump offer absolutely nothing in the way of innovation and the prurient shlock that spews from the shrill cannon that is Cardi B’s mouth just bums me right out.
All that fuddy-duddy bluster aside, when friends of mine hipped to the fact that the new Run The Jewels album featured a prominent Gang of Four sample on the song “The Ground Below,” I, of course, had to hear it. Sure enough, not only did the track make explosive use of the basic elements of “Ether” by the late Andy Gill’s storied ensemble, it also boasted all the aspects I’d been missing from the more popular hip-hop of the current day. No lazy, slurring idiotic bullshit here, the whole album is chock-a-block with dense, eloquent rhymes, all delivered with an emphatic sense of purpose and with a pugnacious production to match it. I bought it for a single track, but love the whole record — I love it when that happens.
3. “Amoral” by Napalm Death
As a fan of (much) earlier Napalm Death records like the almighty Scum from the balmy, carefree days of 1987, I initially scoffed at the suggestion that a Napalm Death record in 2020 could possibly match the cacophonous majesty of their long-ago heyday. That was before laying skeptically unsuspecting ears on their single, “Logic Ravaged By Brute Force,” which was unleashed in February. While furious and frenetic as is their signature, the single also came buoyed by a comparatively expansive production that owed not just a little to my beloved Killing Joke. Upon hearing the rapturous news that a full album — their friggin’ sixteenth — was to follow, I made a plan to pick it up.
Arriving in September, the suitably grim Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism initially disappointed me for not including the single that brought me to it (“Logic…” ain’t on it), but its 12 ferocious tracks are cut from the same fetchingly feral cloth. To take in the full album in a single sitting, honestly, is a bit of a rigorous chore for the ear, but in more measured portions, these tracks pack more than just workaday grindcore carnage. It’s not all just breakneck bombast with rapid-fire drums and splenetic screaming (although there is plenty of all that). Maybe not suitable for a holiday playlist or first-dance wedding selection, but a bracing bit of Brummie blitzkrieg it remains. Duck and cover, motherfuckers….
2. “Mr. Motivator” by IDLES
As you might remember, I was huge on IDLES when I first heard them in 2018. Clangy, shouty and basically bananas, their whole aesthetic was beguiling in its contradictions — sonically violent but lyrically enlightened. Spitting out progressively egalitarian couplets of tolerance and inclusivity with red-faced, vein-popping intensity, lead singer Joe Talbot and company may not trade in subtlety, but it’s hard to quibble with their intentions. That said, many did, and the backlash was pretty sharp, culminating in Blur vs. Oasis-styled feuds with British indie bands like the Sleaford Mods and the Fat White Family, neither of whom — to my ears — are capable of making music as compelling as their nemeses in IDLES. I was stealing myself up the seemingly inevitable failure of their third album, Ultra Mono, given the drubbing it got in the fickle British music press. But guess what? It still kicks a man-sized platter of ass. Here’s my favorite track, delivered with heated aplomb.
1. “Smrt Za Smrt (Revisited)” by Laibach
I already wrote a whole big post about this track, but suffice to say, it’s easily my favorite song of the year, however suitably devoid of any semblance of optimism. While I’d been a big Laibach fan back in the late 80s, I’d sort of fallen off at some point in the mid-90s, feeling I’d gotten all I’d needed from the sardonically po-faced Slovenian foursome. This summer, I read about this impending box set, which featured early archival recordings, new versions of old tracks and a clutch of live material. That sounded intriguing, but I couldn’t rationalize dropping that much cheddar on a box set from a band I hadn’t paid attention to in well over a decade. Then, I heard “Smrt Za Smrt (Revisited).” Bleak, ponderous and unrelentingly sombre, “Smrt Za Smrt” (Slovenian for — wait for it — “Death for Death”) is a blackly atmospheric rumination on conflict and retribution that pulls no punches. “Yeah, this is a real peppy toe-tapper” remarked my friend Rob B when I played it for him. While it does sound a bit like an evil Kraftwerk played at the wrong speed, it’s Hell and gone from lightweight listening. But I find its expansive, stentorian stomp and the unblinkingly funereal pomp-and-circumstance of its pacing to be nothing short of awe-inspiring.
Sick of the whistle-headed vacuity of “WAP”?
Here’s the fucking vaccine.
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