THE YEAR IN MUSIC, 2024: 10 Albums You Should Have Heard This Year but Didn’t

RUI GABRIEL

Compassion

(Carpark Records)

After spending his youth playing punk and indie rock, Rui Gabriel realized he had some growing up to do. His solo debut Compassion gracefully straddles juvenilia and maturity: The music is dreamy, inventive, steeped in youthful obsessions and disreputable radio hits from the ’90s. But the sentiments are the razors in the apples: hard-bitten, painful, wise from disappointment, and braced for the next crisis.

SD

JON MCKIEL

Hex

(You’ve Changed)

Jon McKiel crafts songs that are deliberately, even pointedly disorienting. On his latest album, he worked again with producer Jay Crocker of JOYFULTALK to devise an unusual approach: he recorded himself live playing along to manipulated samples of himself playing live, as though McKiel were collaborating with his own ghost in the machine. The songs thrum with mystery and even menace, touched by something supernatural, with subtle resonances of exotica, tropicália, and Afropop, Paul Simon, and Canadian legend Terry Jacks. Hex more than lives up to its title.

SD

GANAVYA

like the sky I’ve been too quiet

(Native Rebel Recordings)

Don’t parse the cultural threads of Ganavya Doraiswamy’s hypnotic debut album too intently. It’s not welcome. Check the title of the first song: “not in an anthropological mood.” Fair enough. Just let the music engulf you: Carnatic melodies, mostly sung in Tamil (she was raised in South India) and the sometimes somber, sometimes burbling electro-acoustic music ride shifting moods of her journey, with depth (the pleading prayer of “forgive me my”) and wit (one piece is titled “we made it to the underpass”; a later one “we’re still at the underpass”). Simply be swept up in, as one song puts it, “a growing sense of wonder.” Wonder is welcome.

SH

EMILY REMLER

Cookin’ at the Queens

(Resonance Records)

It’s been longer since new music from jazz guitar phenom Remler was last released — 34 years — than she lived — just 32 — dying in 1990 of opioid abuse-hastened heart failure. This collection of two live performances, recorded at Las Vegas’ 4 Queens hotel in 1984 and 1988 won’t make up for those empty decades. But it displays her immense talents wonderfully on standards, pieces by Wes Montgomery, her hero, and Pat Martino and even a medley of Miles Davis’ “So What” and John Coltrane’s “Impressions.”

SH

DA BEATMINERZ

Stifled Creativity

(Soulspazm)

I like to think of them as the Boom Bap Preservation Society, and after almost 20 years it’s nice to welcome another album from the Dewgarde brothers. Despite producing at least two canonical entries to hip-hop’s Golden Age – Black Moon’s Enta da Stage and Smif-n-Wessun’s Dah Shinin’ — Da Beatminerz have often felt, unfairly, like a footnote to that celebrated era. On Stifled Creativity, Evil Dee and Mr. Walt maintain their sweet communion with the age that forged their tastes, but it never feels graspingly nostalgic. There’s soul, there’s grime and there’s a suite of star guests. On the lead single “Seckle,” made with KRS-One, there’s also their great signature: heroically resonant bass.

Martin McKenzie-Murray

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR

Going Home

(Sea Note)

Josephine Foster sure has some pipes. Variously lush, operatic and spectral — she’s a folk soprano possessed of an eccentric vibrato. It’s an extraordinary voice, that, as a teenager, people commissioned for weddings and funerals. An opera school drop-out in the early 2000s, Foster met guitarist Andy Bar in Chicago and the two recorded one folksy, percussion-less album as The Children’s Hour. David Pajo of Slint and Zwan, enchanted, offered his services as drummer. In 2003, the trio recorded Going Home in one day — and then lost the tapes. They weren’t found until last year, in Paul Oldham’s studio, and the three re-joined to help mix it for release earlier this year. It’s magical.

MMM

TAYLOR DEUPREE

Sti.ll

(Nettwerk/12k)

When was the last time you did nothing except let music wash over you while you listen? If it’s been a while, this is the album for it. Sti.ll by Taylor Deupree is a stunning acoustic re-imagining of Stil., his 2002 electronic album. Deupree and composer and engineer Joseph Branciforte transform his original glitch movement classic, one that looped slightly out of sync samples, into a composition for cello, vibraphone, double bass, flute, and other acoustic instruments. Extended techniques, such as pushing water through the mouthpiece of a clarinet, helped create the organic and layered sound. Sti.ll is quiet, slow-building and repetitive. Every sound is intentional and thoughtful, rewarding the patient listener with slow unfolding of textures.

Vanessa Salvia

KALI MALONE

All Life Long

(Ideologic Organ)

Kali Malone, a composer who reinvents the pipe organ into contemporary contexts, invites listeners into a realm of contemplative beauty, reimagining traditional sacred music with a modern paint brush. A powerful combination of brass ensemble, chamber choir and four different pipe organs dating from the 15th to 17th Centuries, the album pulls from 16th-Century sacred music and infuses concepts from minimalist, maximalist, and experimental composition. Her thoughtful layering of slowly evolving harmonies creates a meditative atmosphere that feels both ancient and timeless. Each piece evokes a sense of transcendence.

Don Haugen

GOOD MORNING

Good Morning Seven

(Polyvinyl Records)

There’s great craft here and there’s modesty. A long album of short songs that are lush and gentle. It’s unrushed and charming, the plentiful string arrangements unfussy. A lovely warmth radiates from the Melbourne-duo, and if they feel any bitterness about their relative obscurity after seven albums and a decade of making them, there’s no evidence of it here.

MMM

RAHIM C REDCAR

Hopecore

(Because Music)

When the pills kick in and your guests are in the mood to dance their way through beguiling whims and fancies, whack on this lavish, intelligent pop. It’s French, of course — the fifth album by Héloïse Adélaïde Letissier, performing here as Rahim C Redcar, sometimes known simply as Redcar, other times as Chris, and formerly as Christine and the Queens. As Christine and the Queens, she did a powerhouse take on the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” and collaborated with Madonna and Michael Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, but in Hopecore she, now playing a he, treads the original boards more singularly with “Forgive 8888888,” “Ins8de of Me,” “Deep Holes,” and other lushy lubed party treats.

MT

READ THE REST OF THE YEAR IN MUSIC!

2024: an overview

Don’t call it a comeback (but it is)

Musicians of the year

Thing of the year

Please go home (we’ve had enough of these people)

Albums of the year

Songs of the year

Breakout artists of the year

The year of the CD

The Fyre Award: crappiest festival of the year

The year in EDM

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