A year of under-appreciated records

It’s not too late, is it?

Andrew Womack

16 Jan 2025 — 6 min read

Songs from the list:
Spotify
Apple Music

I never got around to putting together a best of 2024 list. As the year would down I nodded along to all the other lists, thought well yes, some of those are my favorites too. Yes to Astrid Sonne, yes to Still House Plants, yes to Kali Malone—and no to a lot of other things—but still, what’s left to talk about?

What’s left is what was largely left out of a lot of the lists I saw—that is, the 15 albums below. And what else is left, I feel, is a little hope and a lot of hopelessness. Tensions between these senses have been consuming a lot of minds this week. Loss and destruction, the fear of more ahead, there are so many ways to find our way through it, but I find some direction in what David Lynch said: “Keep doing your work. Try to stay true to the work... Keep your eye on the doughnut and not on the hole.”

So let’s go to work.

Armbruster, Can I Sit Here

Back in July I described Can I Sit Here as “if Brian Eno and Robert Fripp had recorded No Pussyfooting but with violins,” and that still holds true, as does my admiration for this album, which does so many fascinating things with heavily effected stringed instruments, to the point where it all become one gorgeous essential tone. / Bandcamp, Bleep, Boomkat

Blanck Mass, Bloodhound / You

Not an album actually, but a single that warps “Stigmata Martyr”-era Ministry into something refreshingly optimistic. And certainly this is a moment where rage into hope feels like a natural progression. / Bandcamp

Gentle Millennials, No Worries if Not

David Allred is such a unique talent, capable of cutting a song down to its essence, its core emotional resonance (see, for example, 2018’s “For Only All”). And now with Gentle Millennials—his band with Fay Funk where they channel ’90s bedroom pop—that ability bounds between the beautiful (“Reruns”) and the hilarious (“Cyber Parenting”) and sometimes both (“Skateboard Song”). / Apple Music, Spotify

HMOT, There Will Come Gentle Rain

This album isn’t quite like anything else I heard this year. I suppose the best way I’ve thought of it is “unprocessed,” and unsettlingly organic. Those descriptors stuck as me when I read the liner notes, which reference Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” set in 2026, when nuclear war has wiped out human life in a California town. In the story, one house still stands, its smart-home devices still continuing their everyday tasks until the kitchen catches fire, burning the house to the ground. So yes, unsettlingly organic. / Bandcamp, Bleep, Boomkat

Celia Hollander, Perfect Conditions

Here Hollander explores the four elements and the interplay between each, which combine to create the “perfect conditions for life on Earth.” While listening, it’s worth watching the song titles to hear how each interaction is expressed in songs like “Earth / Fire,” “Air / Water,” and so on. (As a side note, some tragic news: Hollander and her partner lost their home and all their musical gear in the Eaton fire last week. Hopefully she can get back to making her art again soon.) / Bandcamp, Bleep, Boomkat

Annelies Monseré, I Sigh, I Resign

Medieval song structures here, not unlike a very austere take on Dead Can Dance. It all works, and never reaches so far into its musical style to lose its connection to the present day. What a mesmerizing, calming record this is. / Bandcamp, Boomkat

Bill Orcutt, How to Rescue Things

Every time I hear this album I’m utterly rapt, as Orcutt’s raucous guitar soloing soars above a bed of found music in the form, apparently, of a saccharine gospel record brimming with choruses and strings. It’s not the contrast, actually, and not the humor of the concept, but the way his playing illuminates the beauty of an otherwise forgettable cache of music. / Bandcamp

Porcelain, Porcelain

I hate to always go back to the most obvious influence whenever I reference this band—but if you love Unwound, you will love this. (And if you don’t know Unwound, well there’s still time to fix that and listen to one of the most under-appreciated bands of the ’90s.) So while that provide a reference point for Porcelain, it’s also more of a jumping-off point for this band, whose debut album here portends exciting stuff to come. / Bandcamp

Samuel Reinhard, Movement

Each of the four instrumental, breathtakingly glacial ambient works on this album—centered around piano, cello, bass flute, double bass, baritone sax, and harp—seems as though it could stretch on forever. Each song is also exactly 20 minutes long, which I think only underscores the possibly infinite nature of these pieces—that is, if their recorded versions can’t feasibly continue and continue and continue, then something must stop them, and it may as well be time that does it. / Bandcamp, Bleep, Boomkat

Sunroof, Electronic Music Improvisations, Vol. 3

As moody and dark and enrapturing as you would expect when you consider everything Daniel Miller (the founder of Mute Records) and Gareth Jones—the two people behind Sunroof—have performed or otherwise recorded or produced, which includes everything from the Normal to Depeche Mode to Einstürzende Neubauten to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. That’s a lot of reference points, sure, but not incorrect for mapping out the frontiers this album explores. / Bandcamp, Bleep, Boomkat

TEIP TRIO, TEIP TRIO II

Floating somewhere between avant-rock, drone, and jazz, just when I think I have the sound of this record pinned down into one corner, it fritters away into another. Taken as a whole, this album absolutely casts a spell over the listener, it did for me at least. / Bandcamp

TRAINING feat. Ruth Goller, threads to knot

Guided by Ruth Goller’s pummeling bass, this is ethereal, percussive jazz trance that takes more than a few sharp turns, and sometimes plows straight off the cliff. / Bandcamp, Bleep, Boomkat

Virtual Dreams II - Ambient Explorations in the House & Techno Age, Japan 1993–1999

Who knew the ravers and clubgoers who were falling apart and putting themselves back together again in chillout rooms some 30-odd years ago were listening to the music from the future? Because every one of the 13 tracks on this archival collection, compiled by Music From Memory’s Jamie Tiller and Eiji Taniguchi, sounds as if it could have dropped any time last year—or this year, for that matter. And if you like that, there’s a whole other wealth of listening in the first Virtual Dreams compilation, from 2021. / Bandcamp, Bleep, Boomkat

WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN, NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER

Pre-apocalyptic torch songs from members of Big Brave, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Ada and how could I ask for anything more? / Bandcamp, Bleep, Boomkat