Album of the Half-Year
Something must be in the water, because wow 2021 was a great year for music. My calendar informs me it’s now 2022, but the trend seems to be continuing. I’ll put it to you this way. If you told 2017 Zach “Kendrick’s going to go 5 years before releasing another proper album, and it won’t even be in your top four of the semi-arbitrary six-moth period of its debut,” I’d have gotten real sad. And I am! But I’m also happy, because boy howdy has there been a lot of really good music this year.
#4 — Diaspora Problems, by Soul Glo
Back when Elden Ring (98%) and water (2%) comprised my entire brain, someone tweeted a video of PVP duels set to “Gold Chain Punk.” I had to listen three whole times just to figure out what I heard. Hardly turned it off since.
Diaspora Problems perfectly re-creates that feeling of sitting outside the Old Navy changing room, petrified that my mother beside me could overhear the Immortal Technique’s Revolutionary vol. 2 (my first rap album) blasting through my headphones (I’ll let you decide what it says about me that a half-thai kid named Tai gave me my first rap at book camp in Amherst, Massachusetts).
I swear to god I hear Jello Biafra wafting over this Morello-worthy guitar thrashing. I’ll cut the comparison to Weezer (Pinkerton, of course, the good stuff) and leave you with one final observation. Diaspora Problems starts a trend that every remaining album on this list (except the next) on this list will follow. Diaspora Problems alchemizes the malaise of dark days into the movement of dance, of screaming with loneliness until it emerges as a scream of communal enjoyment.
Essential cuts: “Gold Chain Punk (whogonbeatmyass?)” and “Driponomics”
#3 — It’s Almost Dry, by Pusha T
The second-worst thing you can say about Pusha-T, these several decades into his career: he sounds as good as ever. But that really stretches the limits of underestimating understatement.
The worst thing you can say about King Push: he’s got a single problem: a single problem. Since going solo, he hasn’t found any of those songs that you just can’t stop listening to. He has featured on a few — ”Mercy” and “Runaway” come to mind — but even the most-infectious songs on Daytona (and there are a few) don’t come close to “pandemic” status. Perhaps this helps to make him the Drake-killer. Papi’s made more than his share of hot songs, but Push has all the hot lines.
The best thing you can say about It’s Almost Dry (unlike Daytona): this album feels much longer than its sub 39-minute runtime. The dueling-production of Kanye and Pharrell packed the album tighter than Push’s trunk and you’ll leave feeling like you should have paid more.
Essential cuts: All of them
#2 — Bronco, by Orville Peck
In a normal year, this tops the list. In an unusually good year, this tops the list. This year, Bronco ranks #2 at the halfway mark.
Bronco trades the Twin-Peaks-borrowed, lonely-ily reverberating atmosphere of its predecessor for the syncopated gallop of the road. Peck claims to have written these while stuck at home (and not, as seems more likely, while smolder-staring straight through the window of a tour bus), but you can tell he wanted something to play onstage that didn’t conjure the image of the the Wyoming highway long after your headlights proved ineffective and even the last roadsign faded into the rearview.
Don’t be distracted: Bronco longs and wallows just as much and just as deep as Pony. Maybe even deeper! (Buddy, we’ve got major blues)
Pony arrived as a hyper-inspection of a singular point: the convergence of country and post-pop-punk and Elvis. Bronco branches out to plot a point just west of Honkey Tonk, creating a line pointing arrow-like toward a horizon that somehow already feels like home. The inevitable Stallion will complete the sonic geometry and define the full plane of Peck’s new country offshoot.
Essential Cuts: “Lafayette,” “Blush,” the horn in “Iris Rose”
#1 — Few Good Things, by Saba
This album, by any normal laws of physics, should violently tear itself apart under the many directions charted by its sounds and ambitions.
It lulls you into a bittersweet groove with warm tracks like “Fearmonger,” which find new heights for Pivot Gang’s practically-patented in-house brand of irresistibly-smooth neo-soul, before hitting you with ice-cold bangers like Saba’s never really attempted before (see: “Survivor’s Guilt” or “Stop That”).
So what keeps it together? In a word: “theme”. In two words, “theme” and “mood.”
The diverse soundscape of Few Good Things coheres through the persistence of unease and mission. The unease brings us together, wants you to dance. The iron grip of Saba’s unyielding focus on his mission (“generational wealth / The pressure I built for myself / For all of the people who pics on my grandmama shelf“) stops us from falling into the pit of anxiety. Like Diaspora Problems or Bronco, Few Good Things knows that if there is to be any hope we must not blink into the stare of the problems of our lives, but neither should we let those problems break us.
To paraphrase 2 Chainz: Few Good Things, but it’s got a bunch of ‘em.
Essential Cuts: “Fearmonger,” “Soldier” (No, that’s not André 3000), Stop That
