#worstof2024

Blood Incantation — Absolute Elsewhere (Century Media)

A slab of maximalist prog and irritatingly supercilious “heavy” music, Absolute Elsewhere pulls off a notable trick. Blood Incantation has conjured (the better word here is likely “produced”) a variety of death metal that’s utterly bloodless, duller than dirt displaced from the grave. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so literal. Death metal doesn’t really have to be malodorous, moldy or mutilated — but it doesn’t hurt. But that suggests a more significant point: the best death metal hurts. It’s full of disgust, dreadful drama and rage at the human condition, which is always doomed to death. Blood Incantation seems to have zero interest in feelings of doom and diminishing concern with the fate of bodies and their meaty materiality. The band would rather get smoked out and gaze into the heavens, spinning Wish You Were Here (check out the near-quotations from “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” in “The Message [Tablet III]”) and paging through a pile of Orson Scott Card novels with sticky fingers. Whatever. You do you. But the concepts — a word the record’s arch sensibility just about insists on — are risible, and the music’s preening theatricals have all the charm of Rick Wakeman’s gold lamé cape ‘n’ cowl set. It’s death metal primed for an extended gig at the Las Vegas Sphere, and that might explain why Absolute Elsewhere has ended up on so many highly visible EOY lists: Pitchfork, The Needle Drop, NPR(yep, NPR…). It’s got spectacle, and there are a couple parts where it gets loud, but ultimately, it’s a safe bet.

Jonathan Shaw

Sabrina Carpenter — Short n’ Sweet (Island)

Truth be told, this should really go to Lake Street Dive for me, but I somehow managed to avoid actually listening to them for most of the year. Sabrina Carpenter, though, was much like Chappell Roan and Charli XCX in being unavoidable for several months during the summer. It didn’t matter what kind of place it was, if I stayed long enough, I’d inevitably hear “Espresso.” I couldn’t tell you when it first hit me because, unlike a good shot of the stuff, Carpenter’s sub-Ariana Grande pipes and the casual acoustic guitar plucks do anything but “hit,” the equivalent of aural wallpaper. I’m listening to this record again right now, repeatedly forgetting it’s on, and nothing has swayed my opinion — this is an album and a moment for people really going through it to the point that they can’t hear how boring the vindictiveness is. I’m not even talking about the “everyone except privileged white men” moment, either; I’m talking about your longtime girlfriend cheating on you with your barber and now you’re posting one-star Yelp reviews to get back at them. If that’s not you, if you’re just wallowing in the general malaise of being alive, you don’t count. Also, not for nothing, but I wrote all of this, and I still haven’t gotten to “Slim Pickins” yet. The longest 12 songs and 36 minutes of the year by a comfortable margin (and if Lake Street Dive put a record out, please don’t make me test that theory).

Patrick Masterson

Kim Deal — Nobody Loves You More (4AD)               

Kim Deal is responsible for some of the most monumental—and at the same time minimal—of all rock bass lines, from the ominous pulse of the Pixies “Gigantic” to the anarchic bounce of The Breeders’ “Cannonball.” Her first-ever solo album is very much NOT like that. Instead, it swathes fragile melodies in full-to-overtipping arrangements, with orchestras of strings, Hawaiian slack key guitars, and mariachi bands worth of brass, a lushness that only highlights the ordinariness of her voice and songs. Let’s put some more whipped cream on that turd, how about it?

Jennifer Kelly

Fontaines DC — Romance (XL)

The Dublin five-some swings wide on this fourth full-length, appealing to the masses with pastel colored choruses and limp indie flourishes. It works on a commercial level — after all, this is the disc that got them Grammy nominations, endless “best of” love and a slot on Obama’s play list — but excises everything that made Fontaines DC exciting. What if we took out the dank broody bits and fell in love? What if we ditched the Irish-ness and took a stab at Coldplay? What if we chewed down Fontaines DC’s dark magic into pablum, something so soft and ingratiating that even the Spotify addled masses could get it down? Rarely have I been so excited to listen and so quickly, bitterly disillusioned. One good song comes right at the end in “Death Kink” but that is NOT enough.

Jennifer Kelly

Mercury Rev — Born Horses (Bella Union)

I was so looking forward to this record, the first Mercury Rev album after an almost ten-year gap. I love both the harried brilliance of the band’s early records and the lush psychedelia born of their marriage with David Fridmann. My synapses were short circuiting in anticipation of Born Horses. This fact amplifies my disappointment with the record. Between Jonathan Donahue’s spoken-word delivery, which comes across as a hushed ASMR-inducing purr, and the band’s milquetoast reading of their once-grandiose chamber-psychedelia, I feel the bile rising in the back of my throat and I get choked up whenever I try to play the record. I get it: Donahue and Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiak are looking for new directions to take their sound after decades of exploratory music making, and they’re lacking Fridmann’s guidance, but I’d rather experience another See You on the Other Side than this weak-limbed attempt at chamber-beat poetry. Let’s hope this is a mere meander away from the otherwise eclectic and intriguing trajectory traveled by these upstate New York weirdos.

Bryon Hayes

Jessica Pratt — Here in the Pitch (Mexican Summer)

In personal relationships, saying “it’s not you, it’s me” is commonly regarded as the mark of a cad and/or liar, a convenient excuse at best. But here, I swear I am being both sincere and (as far as I can tell) accurate. I know I first heard of Jessica Pratt around the time her second record, 2015’s On Your Own Love Again, came out and I’d been idly meaning to check out her work ever since then. She seemed to be having a real moment this year with Here in the Pitch, she seems like a cool person, and looking at her discography I deeply respect her commitment to the sub-32 minute LP (an underrated length). But after I hit play and quite enjoy the instrumental intro to “Life Is,” Pratt starts singing… and it just hits my ears wrong. I can’t explain it. I don’t at all think she has a bad voice (arguably I like several other singers that have various things in common with her, vocally). I realize, seeing Here in the Pitch show up on more and more year-end lists (including Dusted ones!), that I am in the minority here, and honestly, I think that’s good! But seeing comment after comment praising the singing here specifically is just a stark reminder that sometimes, people just hear things differently. I wish I did like Pratt’s voice; I suspect I’d enjoy this album quite a bit, maybe enough for it to make my own list. And to be clear, unlike some other acts I don’t enjoy, there’s no part of me that irrationally feels like everyone else is ‘wrong’; if anything, I feel frustratingly close to getting the appeal! But I just can’t seem to get past viscerally not getting her singing. I went back to the LP months after my first try, figuring maybe I just had to get used to it, but no. Really, truly: it’s not Pratt, it’s me.

Ian Mathers

Vampire Weekend — Only God Was Above Us (Columbia)

The arguments over Vampire Weekend’s class tourism and cultural adventurisms are old and tired, but the band keeps making gestures that churn up the discourse. See the video for “Gen-X Cops,” which features Vampire Weekend riding a battered, tagged-up subway train, likely making the run to the Bronx — note the several moments at which the train rises into sunlight, onto Upper West Side elevated tracks. The graffitied car conjures a historical NYC, all grainy celluloid footage, lurid spray paint and flashes of urban spaces and experiences now lost to multiple forces: gentrification, trauma, mortality. The video rolls on, unbothered, and briefly Vampire Weekend’s three members sit facing us, having scored seats; the camera presents a further imaginary provocation, as Koenig (still baby faced, ever belying the impression that he should know better by now), Baio and Tomson suddenly wear NYC cop uniforms. The visual metaphor seems to ask: Who has the right to police culture? Whose cops work the history beat? Koenig sings, “It wasn’t built for me / It’s your academy.” The vaguely anti-institutional bent of the lyric is complicated by the video’s closing images: a crowd exiting the subway train in the density of a morning commute. It’s the masses. The camera shifts to a perspective that hovers over them as they make for the exits. One wonders if an additional metaphorical resonance were intended by that vantage: the band’s desire for a place above the press of humanity, observing its struggle but not in it. That’s on the nose for Vampire Weekend, a band that has never made music for those people, has never indicated any sort of an interest in them. Promo chatter about Only God Was Above Us talked up the record’s “grit,” but I can’t discern any. The songs provide the usual gloss and gleam, distractingly slick surfaces and irritatingly bright tones. It’s mostly blithe, here and there preciously mopey, full of snide winks at “Prep School Gangsters” and love letters to uber-hip Soho gallery owners. Whose academy is that? The best Koenig can do by way of answer is in the chorus to “Pravda”: “Your consciousness is not my problem.” OK. Then please stop cluttering it with your effete quietism and get off the A Train. It’s public space, in which everybody’s consciousness is everybody’s problem.