In this week’s installment of the column we review a frontrunner for album of the year, new releases from two indie rock icons, and roll on with our countdown of the best albums of 2021.

The New Stuff:

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You – Big Thief

Big Thief are something of an anomaly – a traditionally structured four piece rock band drawing heavily from folk that also happens to be the toast of the music critics around the world, and authors of what’s been one of the best reviewed albums of the year so far. I jumped on the Big Thief bandwagon early on with their debut Masterpiece, but even though I enjoyed their three subsequent albums, I still found myself feeling that they hadn’t tapped fully into the potential they displayed during their explosive live shows.

The 80-minute Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is Big Thief finally becoming the band I always thought they could be. A perfect balance of earthy, acoustic-guitar based songs and astral experimentation, what makes this album work is how ostentatious it is. Not in the sex, drugs, and rock and roll way, but in the “we’re all cells in one giant organism, maaannnn,” hippy-dippy, Appalachia revivalism, playing guitars that sound like they were recorded in outer space kind of way. In the early 2010s especially, we heard a ton of bands that tried to write songs that felt as rootsy as “Spud Infinity” and “Red Moon,” but none sounded as tight or genuine as Big Thief does here. It helps that, for all of their ambition, Big Thief has a sense of humor, too, but this sense of humor isn’t overly self-deprecating, and is paired with flawless execution that makes old timey instruments like the fiddle and jaw harp sound fresh. 

Elsewhere, on songs like “Flower of Blood” and “Blurred View,” this album does feel like it truly breaks new ground, contorting guitars into spectral, spacey forms that reinvent the instrument the way Radiohead’s OK Computer did 25 years ago. Even “Heavy Bend,” a 90 minute song with a simple beat and a nylon-strummed guitar – feels like the acoustic ballad remade as a hip-hop instrumental, a subtle injection of rhythm into an archetype that is too often sprawling and formless. Usually I stay away from long albums and forget a lot about them in time. But I can’t stop listening to Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, and, if I had to make a prediction, it’s hard to see a world where this isn’t the best album of the year.

Recommended Tracks: “Spud Infinity,” “Certainty,” “Little Things,” “Heavy Bend,” “Flower of Blood,” “Blurred View,” “Red Moon” “Dried Roses,” “Simulation Swarm,” “Love Love Love”

Visitor – Empath

My first encounter with Empath came when they were opening for Snail Mail around 2018 – and while I didn’t immediately jibe with their frantic and math-y version of punk rock, I started to come around once I realized it was actively annoying other people in the crowd. That probably says more the attitude I have towards strangers at concerts than it does Empath’s music, but it kicked off a love affair with this band’s insistence on pulling melody out of noise and their frantic rhythm section. Visitor is probably their most accessible release – it’s their most laid back from a tempo perspective and has some relatively catchy vocals melodies and choruses. But it’s still furiously idiosyncratic, and stands out as smart, even pretentious music that you can still close your eyes and rock out to.

Recommended Tracks: “Born 100 Times,” “Diamond Eyelids,” “Elvis Comeback Special,” “80s”

Lucifer on the Sofa – Spoon

A pet theory of mine is that, at some point in their careers, every British band tries to record a music hall song, and every American band tries to record a funk song. More often than not, the pivot to funk doesn’t tend to work out too well for the American bands, who just end up coming off as goofy and out of ideas instead of young and energetic. Unfortunately for fans of Spoon, one of the most critically respected bands of the last twenty years, they have indeed put out a funk song, and, not only that, but they’ve also started to delve into blues rock and Southern rock, swerving away from their hypermodern indie sound for a kind of plastic, classic rock imitation that panders to the kind of nostalgic audiences that eat up the work of bands like Black Pumas and latter day Black Keys. In other words, Spoon is on the verge of no longer being cool.

Fortunately, Lucifer on the Sofa isn’t a complete descent into Cage the Elephant-style genericism. “Wild” may not be “Don’t You Evah” or “Inside Out,” but it is the kind of propulsive, uber-competent indie rock track listeners expect from this band, and a lot of their dalliances with their Texas roots do pay off. The swampy stomp of “Held” is well executed enough to distract from silly lyrics, and “The Hardest Cut” pushes bluesy riffage to an absurdist breaking point. In other words, this album is probably destined to go down as Spoon’s worst album, but it’s still Spoon, which means it can really only be so bad.

Recommended Tracks: “Held,” “Wild,” “My Babe”

Laurel Hell – Mitski

I’ve you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know I’m a big Mitski booster, and that I consider her run from 2014 to 2018, which included Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Puberty 2, and Be the Cowboy, to be one of the best from that time period. I even went to one of her last shows before her 2019 hiatus, which, to be honest, I wasn’t sure she’d ever come back from. As heartening has it had been to see Mitski gain some notoriety, the extreme devotion some of her fans showed towards her also resulted in some psychotic behavior online, ranging from bizarre accusations that her father was involved in a CIA coup in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to even more bizarre claims that she was involved in a child trafficking operation. 

Establishing proper boundaries has long been a theme of Mitski’s career. While her work can seem intensely personal, she went to length to describe Be the Cowboy as a performance, and herself as an actress. On that album, this sense of detachment worked to enforce her loneliness and desperation, but on Laurel Hell, she feels distant in a much less compelling way. Stripped of the emo and punk influences that gave her music its edge in favor of art pop arrangements, Mitski sounds like she’s holding the listener at arm’s length on Laurel Hell – it just doesn’t sound like her heart is in it. There are instances of the old Mitski magic – “Heat Lightning” ramps up forebodingly before majestically crashing into a piano ballad, and “The Only Heartbreaker” is a proficient synth-pop song — but there are also songs like “Working for the Knife,” which builds to nothing, and “Should’ve Been Me,” whose instrumental sounds like a lackluster Hall & Oates outtake. It’s not a complete travesty, but it does lack the old Mitski spark, which I dearly hope she finds again in time for her next album.

Recommended Tracks: “Heat Lightning,” “The Only Heartbreaker,” “Love Me More”

Best of 2021, Part 3:

12. Wilds – Andy Shauf

In 2020 Andy Shauf released The Neon Skyline, a concept album about going to a bar and running into your ex-girlfriend. On Wilds, he sings about the same failed relationship (I have no idea who this Judy is but she really did a number on him) but he uses a more spacious, more expansive lyrical and instrumental palette to create a more traditional – but still very effective – album about longing to be with someone you’re no longer with.

Recommended Tracks: “Judy (Wilds),” “Jaywalker,” “Green Glass”

11. I Don’t Live Here Anymore – The War on Drugs

The entire conceit of early The War on Drugs albums was that they were taking a played out, almost mundane genre (80s heartland rock) and using it to create impossibly sprawling and expansive albums. I Don’t Live Here Anymore is certainly a scaled down version of that vision – there are only four songs over five minutes, and most of the lyrics are audible – but that restraint almost makes it more impressive. Adam Granduciel has reimagined heartland rock as something ethereal and progressive and made a case that there’s a place in the future for what was once considered an outdated idea of what constituted good music.

Recommended Tracks: “Harmonia’s Dream,” “I Don’t Wanna Wait,” “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” (feat. Lucius)

10. No Medium – Rosali

Recorded with the David Nance Group, No Medium marries North Carolina-based (and former Philly scene veteran) singer/songwriter Rosali’s country-folk stylings with noisy, lurching guitar riffs that spin off into crackling solos as her lyrics explore death, addiction, and loneliness. It can be heavy at times, but it’s incredibly warm and inviting as well, one of the few Neil Young-esque albums that actually lives up to the Neil Young name.

Recommended Tracks: “Pour over Ice,” “If Not for Now,” “Whatever Love”

9. GLOW ON – Turnstile

If there’s one thing that’s turned me off from hardcore and heavy metal, it’s the genres’ rigidity and insistence on adhering to a formula. Turnstile is a hardcore band, but they absolutely blow up the formula on GLOW ON, incorporating elements of shoegaze, electronic, hip-hop, and even samba across its 15 high energy tracks. It’s shouty, it’s aggressive, but it’s also incredibly positive, an ode to explosive joy instead of an expression of communal rage and angst.

Recommended Tracks: “UNDERWATER BOI,” “HOLIDAY,” “WILD WRLD,” “T.L.C. (TURNSTILE LOVE CONNECTION)”