ALBUM DISCOVERIES OF 2024

Jim White and Marisa Anderson, Le Poisson Rouge, New York 2024

(1) Studio Albums of 2024:

Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, and Andreas Werliin - Ghosted ii (Drag City)
Buy it here

Rosali - Bite Down (Merge)
Buy it here

Water Damage - In E (12XU)
Buy it here

Astrid Sonne - Great Doubt (Escho)
Buy it here

Fabiano da Nascimento & Daniel Santiago - Olhos D’água (Nascimento Music)

Buy it here

Still House Plants - If I Don’t Make It, I Love U (Bison Records)
Buy it here

Myriam Gendron - Mayday (Myriam Gendron)
Buy it here

I had the absolute pleasure of seeing Myriam Gendron play at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge in May, where she opened for Jim White and Marisa Anderson (who were also fantastic). I had passively listened to the record once or twice before the show, but it wasn’t until I saw her playing the songs on stage that night that the weight of her work, and her significance as a folk artist, began to wash over me. In one of those really special intimate moments that occur on occasion between an artist and their audience, she opened up about the impetus for many of the songs on Mayday. She told of how, after a long and exhausting tour during which she often found herself alone, she returned to her home of Montreal for the first time since the death of her mother and was faced with the immense exhaustion and grief that that carried. In “Long Way Home,” Gendron’s low and tranquil-yet-haunting voice–part Catherine Ribeiro, part Leonard Cohen–carries that emotion so powerfully. We were all in tears.

Myriam Gendron began her professional life as a book dealer and copy editor and is a deep lover of poetry, citing writers like Dorothy Parker and Henry Miller as influences from which she has repurposed stanzas and drawn inspiration for her own lyrics. Gendron, who sings in both English and French, is a folk musician in the traditional sense, carrying on the convention of revisiting canonical songs from the folk artists of yesterday. In many of her songs she takes on these old standards, imbuing them with new layers and the raw emotions, be they sorrowful or rejoicing, that she is so captivatingly able to bring forth. Her sources are wide and sometimes surprising, often plumbed from the likes of Alan Lomax’s archives or Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Mayday’s opener, the instrumental track, “There is No East or West,” is an homage to the John Fahey tune, “In Christ There is No East or West.” “Dorothy’s Blues” is drawn from Parker’s poetry. The song “Lullay, Lullay” is a reimagining of “The Coventry Carol,” a 16th century English Christmas carol about the Massacre of the Innocents, in which King Herod orders all male infants to be killed. The song originally takes the form of a lullaby from a mother to her condemned child, but Gendron has repurposed it as a sort of goodbye dirge to her own mother. The title of Mayday has moving significance itself. In an interview with B. Arthur from the great Aquarium Drunkard, Gendron explains, “Mayday. It expresses you know, those days that are so sunny and beautiful. But Mayday is also a distress signal. So... there’s all of that. My mother died in May and my daughter was born in May. It’s a month of many contrasts.”

The album is studded with musicians’ musicians: guitarists Bill Nace and Marisa Anderson (absolute shredders), drummer Jim White (prolific, check out his new supergroup project The Hard Quartet with Stephen Malkmus, Matt Sweeney, and Emmett Kelly), and out-there saxophonist Zoh Amba (incredible, also a very weird, memorable, and captivating performer) all make appearances across the album’s 10 tracks, with Amba delivering a frenzied and wailing solo at the end of the album’s closer, “Berceuse.” Mayday is an album enchanting, fighting, and full of depth. With it, like the inspirations she mines from, Gendron cements herself into the company of the greatest North American folk singers in history.

Cowboy Sadness - Selected Jambient Works (People Teeth)
Buy it here

Adrianne Lenker - Bright Future (4AD)
Buy it here

Total Blue - Total Blue (Music From Memory)
Buy it here

Powers/Rolin Duo - Clearing (Astral Editions)
Buy it here

SML - Small Medium Large (International Anthem)
Buy it here

Kali Malone - All Life Long (Ideologic Organ)
Buy it here

Moin - You Never End (AD 93)
Buy it here

Carme López - Quintela (Warm Winters)
Buy here

Naima Bock - Below A Massive Land (Sub Pop)
Buy it here

Fabiano do Nascimento & Sam Mendel - The Room (Nascimento Music)
Buy it here

Julia Holter - Something in the Room She Moves (Domino)
Buy it here

Nala Sinephro - Endlessness (Warp)
Buy it here

Not Waving & Romance - Infinite Light (Ecstatic Recordings)
Buy it here

Wendy Eisenberg - Viewfinder (American Dreams Records)
Buy it here

Itasca - Imitation of War (Paradise of Bachelors)
Buy it here

(2) Live Albums of 2024

Jeff Parker ETA IVtet - The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem)
Buy it here

Horse Lords - As it Happened (RVNG Intl.)
Buy it here

Steve Gunn & David Moore - Live in London
Buy it here

(3) Reissues of 2024

Gastr del Sol - We Have Dozens of Titles (Drag City)
Buy it here

Can - Live in Paris 1973 (Spoon Records)
Buy it here

Galaxie 500 - Uncollected Noise New York ’88-’90
Buy it here

Aerial M - The Peel Sessions (Drag City)
Buy it here

Keith Hudson - Playing It Cool (Week-End Records)
Buy it here

(4) Albums Released in Years Past, “Discovered” in 2024:

Sabreen - Death of the Prophet (PopArabia 1987)
Buy it here

Earlier this year, I did something I had never done before, something that would make the skin of most parents crawl: I went to a stranger’s house to meet with people from the internet.

On the site formerly known as Twitter (and now on BlueSky), I follow Gary Sullivan, aka @Bodegapop, a prolific collector and curator of predominantly Arab cassettes and vinyl he picks up from his extensive global travels and, more pertinently to his alias’ namesake, from mom and pop bodegas with music collections around New York City. I’ve been listening to Gary’s fantastic show, Bodega Pop, on WFMU for quite some time, and am regularly sent into new journeys of musical discovery from both his program and recommendations online. When he one day posted “Anyone in the NYC area interested in a listening party focused on Arabic bangers & novelty records from the 1960s-70s? Thinking about pizza, beer, records, for a couple to a few hours in Astoria on March 2, 3, 8, or 9. If 5-10 folks are interested, we'll make it happen,” I raised my proverbial hand immediately.

A couple weeks later, I found myself in the warm and welcoming home of Zora and Peter, Gary’s friends and fellow global music journeyists, sipping esoteric liqueur and slamming pizza while listening to and discussing a wide range of retro jams from across the Arab world. I was pleased to find that I was in the company of kindred spirits from all over the world. It was really a true delight to spend an evening surrounded by people with a deep love of music and traveling the world through sound (all were also prolific global travelers themselves). There were our hosts Zora, a travel writer whose work focuses on exploration in the Arab world, and Peter, a professor of criminal justice at John Jay with some pretty radical ideas for justice reform. Among the guests were Shiloh, a radio show host and Chinatown vinyl purveyor at Paradise of Replica; Tatyana, flautist in a traditional British Isles music trio and owner of the Astoria record store Pancakes; Ariyan, an Iranian-American musician and founder of the Technowruz party and member of the bands Googoosh Dolls and Tar Of; Stephen, another traveler and monthly radio host of Extended Fam Radio; and Jemayel, crypto researcher and guitarist in the LA postrock, jazz-fusion band Charts and Maps. We were all brought together by someone on the internet, so the lesson here is that this is always a safe thing and advisable thing to do.

I discovered Sherifa Fadel that evening, and I’m not sure if it was then or later (also through Bodega Pop) that I found Sabreen, a mesmerizing Palestinian band from Jerusalem who put out this record in 1987, during the onset of the first Intifada. Sabreen, or “those awaiting,” create songs that are at turns mournful but steadfast in their celebration and resistance. The song “Improvisation on Moondance” recalls the enormous amounts of cultural exchange between the Arab world, the Maghreb, and the roots it laid in Spanish music. The instrumental piece takes all sorts of twists and turns, venturing into realms of flamenco and even something I might dare call reminiscent of bluegrass. “Eash Ya Kdeesh” oscillates between lament and determined march, and I can’t help but think of the strength and will of the people who hold on to their ancestral homeland against the brutal and depraved might of empire.

Sherifa Fadel - Ah Minel Sabr (City Media)