Sometimes my favorite albums in a given year line up pretty closely with the critical consensus, of least at a few publications. This was not one of those years. Turns out I wasn’t interested in debates about personae, albums that were adventurous but difficult, or multiple, super-hyped albums by a band that seems overly wrapped up in their own attempts at profundity. I wanted melody: the accessible, hummable, stick-in-your-head kind.
It wasn’t a conscious desire throughout the year, but when it came time to start voting in year-end polls, the albums I gravitated to were mostly the ones I had kept coming back to all year, with a few exceptions. Here, then, are my 10 favorite albums of 2019:
1. Weyes Blood, “Titanic Rising” — Natalie Mering had released three albums as Weyes Blood before her latest, but “Titanic Rising” eclipses them all with elegant songwriting that has a classic-pop bent. Her voice is burnished and low, and she sings with a mix of restraint and deep feeling that’s intoxicating.
2. The Pernice Brothers, “Spread the Feeling” — Joe Pernice has a way with words, and also with melodic hooks, and he combines them unbelievably well on the Pernice Brothers’ first new album since 2010. Every song on “Spread the Feeling” is waiting to get stuck in your head, but “The Devil and the Jinn,” featuring Neko Case, is a great place to start.
3. The Hold Steady, “Thrashing Thru the Passion” — After the disappointing “Heaven Is Whenever” in 2010, and the so-so follow-up “Teeth Dreams” in 2014, it wasn’t unreasonable to think maybe the Hold Steady had simply run its course. But late in 2017, they started releasing singles every few months — really good singles — and soon enough, they were back with “Thrashing Thru the Passion,” the band’s seventh album. It’s the first since “Stay Positive” to include Franz Nicolay on keyboards and backing vocals, and his importance to the band’s sound can’t be understated. The 10 songs on “Thrashing Thru the Passion” feature all the group’s best elements: high-powered guitar riffs, subtly punchy countermelodies on piano and Finn’s enviable skill as a storyteller. Sure, the songs are gritty, but they’re also funny, and it’s a welcome return to form.
4. Bruce Springsteen, “Western Stars” — “Springsteen on Broadway” got more attention — reimagining your catalog of touchstone songs for a run of sold-out performances, a Netflix special and a soundtrack album will do that — but “Western Stars” shouldn’t be overlooked. Springsteen’s 19th album features some of his most compelling writing in years on lyrics that roam through the West. As I wrote in a review for Paste, “Manifest destiny—the idea that American settlers were fated to spread across the continent—takes a different form here, through restless men who seek not dominion but escape as they try to outrun their choices or, sometimes, their very natures.” Pair that with stirring string arrangements that echo the soundtracks from epic Hollywood Westerns and the result is an album that exerts a strong pull.
5. Michael Kiwanuka, “Kiwanuka” — The English/Ugandan singer’s previous work had never really grabbed me, but his latest is beautiful and gripping. As I wrote for Paste, “Kiwanuka” “is a breathtaking retro-futuristic hybrid of funk, soul, rock and folk that somehow exists in all of the past 50 years at once. It’s a tumultuous record, at once confessional and restive, and shot through with a quiet anguish.”
6. Robert Ellis, “Texas Piano Man” — This feels like the album where Ellis said “screw it” and did whatever he wanted, without regard for anybody’s expectations. He’s been an indie-country kind of guy on previous releases, but there’s a strong piano-pop sensibility here, “on songs that are bracing, sad and funny, sometimes with an undercurrent of restless anger,” as I wrote in February. “Texas Piano Man” didn’t get nearly as much attention as it should have, which indicates that Ellis is vastly underrated as a songwriter, and a musician.
7. Kim Gordon, “No Home Record” — OK, this one is an exception to my hummable-melodies preference this year, but Kim Gordon is nearly always exceptional. One of my favorite things about this album is how she sort of breezes past the legacy of Sonic Youth, the band she co-founded in 1981 with future ex-husband Thurston Moore, and delivers a collection of songs just as strong, entirely on her own. In a review for Paste, I described “No Home Record” this way: “It’s jagged, chaotic and mesmerizing in a way that pulls you inevitably into the thick of it, as if the songs were exerting their own inescapable gravity.” Gordon disdains being thought of as an icon, but even after making music for nearly 40 years, there’s almost nobody cooler.
8. Philip B. Price, “Bone Almanac” — Though Price has been making music for decades, my introduction came via Winterpills, the band he has fronted since 2004. “Bone Almanac” is his first solo album since then, and it’s a beauty. The Northampton singer was inspired by the sense of urgency he feels regarding climate change, but don’t let the subject put you off: “Price’s music seeps in on a subtle tide of melancholic vocals and layered musical arrangements full of acoustic guitar playing that can be surprisingly deft,” I wrote for Paste.
9. The Highwomen, selt-titled — Supergroups tend to look better in publicity photos than they sound on albums, but the Highwomen — Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris and Amanda Shires — got everything right on their self-titled debut. The songs are catchy, there are flashes of humor, grit and gutbucket sentiment (if you can make it through “Crowded Table” without a lump in your throat, you’re more immovable than I), and the singers’ voices meld beautifully together on layers of harmony as they rotate through leads and backing vocals.
10. Purple Mountains, “Purple Mountains” — This album marked singer and songwriter David Berman’s reemergence after ending his run as/with Silver Jews in 2009 and taking a nine-year hiatus from music. “Purple Mountains” is a collection of eclectic, sad-sack indie-rock songs, presented with mordant wit and vibrant wordplay. (Berman and Joe Pernice were grad students in the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts at the same time in the early ’90s.) Sadly, Berman committed suicide a few weeks after the album came out, adding a crushing postscript to what should have been a celebratory moment.
Honorable mentions: Hallelujah the Hills, “I’m You”; Leonard Cohen, “Thanks for the Dance”; The National, “I Am Easy to Find”; Reese McHenry, “No Dados”; Sidney Lindner, “Summer Ghosts/Nightfalls”; Sinkane, “Depaysé”; Mark Mulcahy, “The Gus”; Katie Toupin, “Magnetic Moves.”