#tyminski

Behold, my religious trauma playlist

Crucified // Army of Lovers

Take Me to Church // Hozier

Saint Bernard // Lincoln

Arsonist's Lullabye // Hozier

Foreigner's God // Hozier

Our Lady of Sorrows // My Chemical Romance

House of Wolves // My Chemical Romance

Vampires Will Never Hurt You // My Chemical Romance

Call Me By Your Name // Lil Nas X

Saint Veronika // Billy Talent

Lent // Autoheart

The Cult of Dionysus // The Orion Experience

Church // Fall Out Boy

God Syndrome // Madame Macabre

Oh Ana // Mother Mother

Southern Gothic // Tyminski

Hellfire // Jonathan Young

Soldier, Poet, King // The Oh Hellos

Bedroom Hymns // Florence + The Machine

From Eden // Hozier

"Blackbird on the old church steeple.

Spanish moss hangin' in the settin' sun.

Every house's got a Bible and a loaded gun.

We got preachers and politicians.

Round here it's kinda hard to tell which one,

Is gonna do more talking with a crooked tongue.

This town's got the good lord shakin' his head.

Lookin' down thinking we ain't heard a word he said.

A word he said.

Baptized in Southern Gothic,

In the garden of good and evil.

Devil right here, who woulda thought it?

In a town full of God fearin' people.

Dogs and deadbolts guard the night.

Nothing left to do but kneel and pray.

We got a church on every corner,

hmmm okay then: 17 favorite albums of 2017….

17. waxahatchee - out in the storm 

i gotta be honest, it’s a weird feeling for me to consider a waxahatchee album as just barely making the cut, but here we are.  in my wholly unsolicited opinion, 2017 has been the most solid year of music since the epic throwdown that was 2013, which means that even my love for katie crutchfield can’t put her higher on this list.

favorite track: silver

16. austra - future politics 

this was one of the first albums of the year and it was obnoxiously, horrifyingly timely, given the content and the context.  katie stelmanis has always had an exquisite voice and this is no exception; everything from the persistent hunt of the title track to those rich harmonies of the shimmery i love you more than you love yourself is just right on fucking point.

favorite track: future politics

15. sylvan esso - what now 

i have a weakness for folks straddling the line between dance pop and straight up weird shit, and , really, sylvan esso just does this better than anyone else in the world.

favorite track: the glow

14. japanese breakfast - soft sounds from another planet 

this is one of those albums that just disappears.  it’s like ambient noise, almost, borderline impossible to focus on but unendingly enjoyable to put on a loop while you’re working, or reading, or taking a nap.  it’s calm and calming, so long as you don’t try too hard to focus on it and give yourself a headache and some whiplash when you finally hone in on some of the lyrics.

favorite track: road head

13. blondie - pollinator 

i’m going to be biased about this because this was the album i finally got to see blondie tour on.  80% of the show was off this album and it was outstanding to witness debbie harry, 72 years, jumping around the stage with more energy than anyone in the entire theater.  they really leaned into the pop-rock sound on this one, pushing towards a paramore a la the early aughts tone.  

favorite track: long time

12. gordi - resevoir 

found this totally by accident when she covered linkin park, of all things, in the live lounge.  with a harp and trumpets.  even if nothing on this album quite reaches those heights, it’s still a strong entry from start to finish, weird and different and rich in the same way that lorde’s first album was weird and different and sparse.  

favorite track: all the light we cannot see

11. the national - sleep well beast

despite eschewing the full-throated political commentary i think most fans of the national were expecting from this album, it’s regardless managed to capture the drowning, claustrophobic anxiety that a significant majority of the united states is experiencing this year.  it’s a dense, sonically complex collection of songs, always approaching raggedy edges without ever quite getting there, pushing in equal weights with the rolling percussion and heavy electronica and berninger’s voice. 

favorite track: empire line

10. tyminski - southern gothic 

call it an indulgence for home.  in a lot of ways, i want to hate dan tyminski’s voice, because it toes right up to the line of the obnoxious twangy, nasally whine that too much very bad country is known for; but, just like patterson hood, he never crosses that line.  and similarly, like hood’s drive-by truckers, he’s taken a moment, as a white male country singer, to call out the shortsightedness and hypocrisy plaguing southern states and the majority of his fanbase.  regardless of his politics, he’s taken the best parts of bluegrass as building blocks for a genre-crossing offering that one might even call pop-esque (but probably wouldn’t, lest unwarranted comparisons to nickel creek pop up).  everything from the structure and percussion and bass and backing vocals is pop-like, pulled into bluegrass only by tyminski’s voice and the picking banjo and steel guitar.

favorite track: while hollow hallelujah is musically my favorite, the title track is an unfliching glare into the hypocrisy of the southern religion i was born into, so i can’t help but favor it.

9. the xx - i see you

after pretty thoroughly convincing me that we likely were never going to get another album from them, the xx got their shit back together and put out the best album of their career.  from the rattling horns kicking off the album to the hold-your-breath pause of performance right in the middle, it pushes along steadily, romy croft and oliver sim trading off vocals in the most effective and natural way they ever have.

favorite track: a violent noise

8. the new pornographers - whiteout conditions 

i’ve already flailed incessantly about my love for this album, the first entry of this band without dan bejar and, frankly, in my humble opinion, one of their best.  i’m admittedly biased, as someone who’s generally skipped the majority of bejar’s tracks on prior albums, but regardless: this is the most straighforwardly relatable and political album they’ve put out, and also the one where they’ve most effectively mined the vocal harmonies that have always been one of their strongest points.  i’ve loved this band since i was eighteen years old and twelve years and dozens of unbelievably excellent hooks into it, they’ve delivered a devastatingly perfect one that tops everything they’ve done to date, in a song that addresses the overwhelming struggle with depression that so many people deal with every day.  the fact that carl newman spends the whole album singing like he’s trying to break out of something is just the final piece of the puzzle.

favorite track: obviously, unequivocally whiteout conditions, though second sleep is a damn close second

7. perfume genius - no shape 

i, admittedly, was not a huge perfume genius fan at the start of this year.  i didn’t dislike any of his music, but i could take it or leave it, save for a wonderful covers.  but this album? there’s no way not to love it.  he reigned in some of the frills from his earlier sound, pared it down and stripped it to something that’s still rich, that still demands your focus, but has opened up to use the spaces between the sounds as much as anything else and, in turn, delivered the best music of his career.  there’s no wasted space on any song, even those that slow down and stretch out; on the flip side, the heaviest sounds still save the spaces and push into them for a broader, rounder sound.  

favorite track: slip away

6. kesha - rainbow 

as a matter of personal opinion, it was incredibly difficult not to just automatically put this at the top of the list.  after closely following the whole legal battle kesha’s been fighting against lukasz gottwald, that she was finally able to release music that she made herself, with her own sound, was so triumphant that nothing could compare.  while it’s not my singular favorite album of the year, it’s still outstanding: everything from the big blasty horns provided by the dap-kings on woman to the country jaunt of hunt you down to that goddamned high note on praying is on point and a determined middle finger thrown out at gottwald and everyone around him.

favorite track: boogie feet

 5. st. vincent - masseducation 

annie clark is (a) one of the greatest guitarists currently living right now, and (b) probably the best guitarist in the world completely unafraid to team up with a pop-whispering drum-ho (i say with love) like jack antonoff and cut her guitar playing down by about 80% on an album.  that’s not to say that she isn’t still ripping things up on a guitar anywhere on the album, because she certainly is, but she’s also got kamasi washington bopping along on the sax and heavy synths swallowing up the more traditional guitar-and-bass her songs are built on.  it’s a massive shift even from her last album, which in itself was a hefty step away from her earlier sounds; she leans back into her early singer-songwriter sound a few times on the album but, for the most part, pushes hard into unpredictable synths and rich backing vocals that, somehow, turn into the most complete st. vincent album she’s ever released.

favorite track: it’s a tie between the saddest song on the album, happy birthday, johnny, and the most unrelenting, sugarboy

4. torres - three futures

torres has been stalking towards a more defiant sound since she first popped up, and this probably isn’t the culmination, but is certainly a major step in that direction.  she took the stark girl-and-guitar sound she’d previously used and built out her sound with more electronics and the best vocal performances of her career but, somehow, still created an album that sounds like how standing in an empty room alone and glaring at a blank wall feels: sharp, infuriating, echoing.  and, pointedly, the themes of the album– women claiming space for themselves in the world, for better or worse– are of unavoidable importance.

favorite track: tongue slap your brains out

3.  zola jesus - okovi

there are musicians who create heavy music, both emotionally and musically, and then there’s nika roza danilova. every moment of okovi is imbued with guilt and frustration and vocals that, regardless of if they’re part of the bombast of exhumed or the fragile supplications of witness.  if this album was a movie, heavy with the weight of losing friends to suicide, it’s a movie my parents would have tried to keep me from watching for as long as possible.  

favorite song: remains

2.   lorde - melodrama 

as someone who was wholly blown away by lorde, from her first ep to her first album, i know personally was holding my breath about this album.  would it live up to the first one? would she aim to replicate the same sound, like fellow 2013-freshman london grammar did, or try to build on it, like chrvrches did?  and instead, she did neither and went in a whole new direction, throwing out a first single that sounds like the teenaged lovechild of pop-whisperer jack antonoff and carly rae jepsen: starry-eyed romanticism yelling out from under a first heartbreak, a book of tori amos lyrics, and seventeen different drum machine options.  it sounds like a recipe for disaster and yet, somehow, it’s nothing less than pure musical excellence.  after releasing a debut where she clearly looked at the existing musical mores and then discarded them, lorde turned around and threw out an album that was 50% pure pop heartbreak and 50% joni mitchell-by-way-of-kate bush.  there’s no tempering of her sound, no moment on the album where she holds back with her sound or her words, and the result is nothing short of brilliant.

favorite song: the louvre

 1.   julien baker - turn out the lights

where an apparent theme this year has been artists opening up their sound and growing into them, julien baker has done the seemingly impossible: she did exactly what she did on her excellent first album, just somehow better.  this album is, unquestionably, the epitome of what a singer-songwriter album should be: it’s not only almost completely recorded and produced by baker herself, it’s also an introspective evaluation of all of the worst parts of herself, a pragmatic lyrical deconstruction of the hardest, darkest pieces of self, offered over the simplest, basest of musical accompaniment.  julien baker sings with intent and direction, with no wasted moments, no extra spaces, no flourishes or frills or vocal indulgences, without wallowing or delving into moping wishes for someone to validate her faults.  she digs into the aftermath of addiction, the frustrations of faith in the midst of failure, the push for solid ground somewhere in the middle of a world where the god you believe in is invoked against you and your sexuality over and over again.  much in the way that lorde, at the age of 20, is elevating pop music to levels that no one else is even thinking about, julien baker is the flip side of the coin, a 22 year old stripping music down to nothing more than a feeling and a tune and hitting heights that no one really has in years.

TYMINSKI Southern Gothic Label: Mercury Released: October 20, 2017