2021: "All those little pieces"

This year's soundtrack - on spotify. 

1. Highwomen - The Highwomen

The Highwomen (Elektra, 2019)

2. Hot & Heavy - Lucy Dacus

Home Video (Matador, 2021)

3. Robber - The Weather Station

Ignorance (Fat Possum, 2021)

4. Every Time I Hear That Song - Brandi Carlile

By The Way, I Forgive You (Elektra, 2018)

5. Keeps Me Running - Esther Rose

How Many Times (Father/Daughter, 2021)

6. Nightflyer - Allison Russell

Outside Child (Fantasy, 2021)

7. Kokomo, IN - Japanese Breakfast

Jubilee (Dead Oceans, 2021)

8. Hard Drive - Cassandra Jenkins

An Overview on Phenomenal Nature (Ba Da Bing!, 2021)

9. Bloodshot - Julien Baker

Little Oblivions (Matador, 2021)

10. Errors in the History of God - Biffy Clyro

The Myth of the Happily Ever After (Warner, 2021)

11. Searching for the Truth - Katie Pruitt

Expectations (Rounder, 2020)

12. Harmonia's Dream - The War on Drugs

I Don't Live Here Anymore (Atlantic, 2021)

13. I'm Through - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

Georgia Blue (Southeastern, 2021)

14. Go Your Way - Robert Plant and Alison Krauss

Raise the Roof (Rounder, 2021)

Brandi Carlile - as a member of the Highwomen as well as via By The Way, I Forgive You - and Julien Baker have been the biggest artists of my 2021, both more or less on constant rotation throughout a year in which I listened to a lot of music. Ignorance has been there all year too, though it was only recently that I learned "Robber" was a metaphor for capitalism, making it even better. Every song on this playlist, and the albums they came from, has sunk in deep, but amongst them, "Hard Drive" stands out as a genuinely magical, hypnotically entrancing and - if I can claim this for what's still in the end just a pop song - ultimately healing moment in a year where such was very needed.

Samanta Schweblin - Little Eyes

Schweblin's ability to unnerve is on display from the very first of Little Eyes' short chapters, as a teen girl works out how to communicate with her 'kentuki' only for things to go horribly wrong now that the robotically controlled stuffed toy's user ('dweller'), anonymous behind the internet somewhere in the world, can reach more directly into the 'keeper' 's life. 

The book never returns to that first vignette; it's structured with a combination of similar stand-alones and chapters forming parts of longer narratives, all showing different ways in which the kentuki technology is either used for malign and harmful purposes or, despite initial promise, is unable to offer real liberation from the material and spiritual impoverishment of the physical world and - in Schweblin's telling - the darkness of human nature. It's inventive and propulsive, and to the very end I wasn't expecting that every single thread would end badly - it's a slippery, layered book that has a strong, dark vision but doesn't at any point feel gratuitous. It's powerful.

(also - Fever Dream, which increasingly feels like an out-an-out modern classic)

Lee Lai - Stone Fruit

I thought this was good - its truthful messiness translated into a story that appears simple on its surface while containing depths.

(see here)

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Raise the Roof

I don't know what it is about these latter day Robert Plant records that strikes such a chord with me; maybe it's something about the combination of the British folk + rock and roll elements, plus the eclectic other sources that find their ways into the mix. Where it started was Raising Sand, which has turned out to be one of those albums that just hasn't gone away, years on, and Raise the Roof is the first time that he and Krauss have returned to collaborating. It's not as great as the first one, but it's good still; favourites are the really quite folksy "Go Your Way" (Plant on mournful lead vocals) and "It Don't Bother Me" (Krauss over the top of a forceful thrum), also a jaunty version of "Can't Let Go".

Lesley Chow - You're History

The project is feminist, with its close readings of key records by popular but - Chow contends - still underrated female pop artists. At the same time, it's about taking the music and sounds of pop music, and their effects on the listener, seriously, and challenging the assumptions about what constitutes 'quality' music (eg the literary lyrics of Bob Dylan) that tend to prevail in music writing and among 'educated' music listeners. I skimmed the chapters on most of the artists I didn't already know, while enjoying the overview essays and many of the individual chapters; artists including Kate Bush, TLC, Neneh Cherry, Taylor Swift, Shakespears Sister and more.

Rick and Morty season 5

I've lost the thread of this a bit in watching it at pretty long intervals, but Rick and Morty has become one of those shows with enough comforting familiarity - plus it has the fizzy feeling of creativity, even if I'm not always sure what it's in aid of or how it all fits together - to be watchable anyway.

Natasha Brown - Assembly

So good. This tightly condensed slice of fiction sent a shiver through me.

Army of the Dead

Zack Snyder netflix zombie heist movie.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - Georgia Blue

Isbell and friends covering songs by Georgia artists, including some utterly iconic ones - "It's A Man's, Man's, Man's World", "Midnight Train to Georgia" (both sung by Brittney Spencer), "I've Been Loving You Too Long" (a bold one to take on that Isbell treats with sincerity and his own style), a celebratory rave-up version of "Cross Bones Style" sung by Amanda Shires, two R.E.M. bookends ("Nightswimming" complete with Bela Fleck on banjo and "Driver 8"), all of which work well. 

My favourites are an epic version of what was already an epic song in Brandi Carlile's version of "Kid Fears", complete with backing vocals from Julien Baker (thereby bringing together probably the two most important artists of my 2021 with a big song from my pretty distant past), and Isbell's take on a yearning Vic Chesnutt song called "I'm Through" - plus probably that "Cross Bones Style" take.

It all hangs together surprisingly very well - something about the quality of the songs and of the covering artists, and maybe the way that a lot of the songs/artists being covered have seeped into the contemporary americana-plus sound of Isbell and co, so that covers in those styles end up being apt, and completing a circle of sorts.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner - Fleishman Is In Trouble

It's tempting to be a bit snobby about this book, to dismiss it for its readability and (on the surface) familiar themes and perspectival shifts for contemporary literary fiction (re: the perspectival shifts, an obvious reference point is Fates and Furies; another, that came out in the same year as Fleishman, is Trust Exercise). And I do think there's something to that response, which I felt in myself the whole time I was reading it. 

At the same time though, there is real penetration and insight in it - especially in the way that Libby emerges as the most interesting character as Toby recedes a little and Rachel has also come to the forefront. Fleishman has something real to say about marriage, women's experience and modern society, as well as about identity and individual and social psychology and the gaps in people's understanding of each other, and much of it lands properly in the novel's later stages, with the 'reveal' of Rachel's side of events and, in parallel, with the shift in understanding on Libby's part and shading in of her life. The twists are twists and shifts in perspective, not in plot exactly, and they're pretty strongly signalled - which is a good thing in this case.

Just how well it works depends - and how much credit to give the book - depends on how seriously one takes the metafictional gesture near the end when Libby is revealed as not only the narrator, which we've known all along, but also the possible 'author' of the very book we've been reading ... which in turn brings into play all the unreliabilities that we might expect from her character, telling the story of these characters, based on the evidence of the text itself. The more seriously we take that, the better the book becomes - and it's impossible to know (aptly?) how seriously that should be.