Listening At The End
In a year lacking so many other things, in 2021 I used music much the same way an inexperienced handyman spreads far too much spackle on a hole in the drywall. This year, I added about 40 records to my vinyl collection, roughly 55 digital albums on Bandcamp, a handful of CDs, and Spotify tells me I spent 15,720 minutes listening to music. Oh, and I recorded and released an album myself. That’s a lot of spackle on some pretty fucked up walls.
I tend not to care much for year-end lists. They are generally a rundown of who had a big enough marketing budget to campaign on, and ranking those feels even weirder than ranking art. So what I’m going to do instead is tell you about some of the things I found myself listening to a lot. Not all of it came out this year, because tastes and discovery and really hardly anything actually works in so linear a fashion. So here we go.
At some point in the recent past, I started a playlist on Spotify called sad bedroom. It has a very specific aesthetic to it typified by chorusy guitars, drum machines, and vocals with so much reverb on them as to almost be ridiculous. When I couldn’t decide what I wanted to listen to, this was the playlist I would throw on. Yes, there is a Cure song on it. And I restricted myself to a single Joy Division song. Please applaud my restraint.
Where I lacked restraint was with Emma Ruth Rundle. Emma Ruth Rundle began the year by releasing an EP collaborating with the metal band Thou, a follow up to last year’s full length album with them. But Emma Ruth Rundle did not stop there, no. Emma Ruth Rundle also repressed her 2018 album On Dark Horses, took pre-orders for a repress of her first solo album Some Heavy Ocean, and finally, Emma Ruth Rundle released a masterpiece titled Engine of Hell. I feel like more than any other single artist, I spent most of 2021 listening to Emma Ruth Rundle, watching videos of Emma Ruth Rundle performing live, expectantly waiting for Emma Ruth Rundle records to arrive in the mail, and telling anyone who might listen that they too should be listening to Emma Ruth Rundle. No joke, as I type this, I am wearing an Emma Ruth Rundle t-shirt. It has a skull on it and I’ve cut the sleeves off of it and it is very cool.
Emma Ruth Rundle.
My earbones were dominated by women this year. Like many other sad girls in America, I spent enough time listening to Phoebe Bridgers for Spotify to list her as my top artist. Lucy Dacus’ album got some play. And I rounded out the boygenius triumvirate by making Julien Baker one of the precious few concerts I went to this year. I specifically bring up Baker so I can brag that I got to sit on a Zoom call with her and she complimented the Carly Rae Jepsen t-shirt I was wearing and I will take that with me into the ethereal beyond. The compliment and the shirt. I also need to recognize Sidney Sprague for writing what may be the perfect anthem for 2021, and an excellent album altogether.
While I am waiting on Carly to release a new album next year (insert Laura Linney Love Actually ecstatic dance here), I realized I should stop being such an uptight butthole and listen to Aly & AJ and so that is how I wound up listening to the Ten Years EP roughly six million times.
I know they put out an album this year and that it is pretty good, but the consciously nostalgic synths and downbeat drum machines on Ten Years spoke to me on a gut level. It’s a sound I found myself drawn to a lot in 2021. At any moment during the year, I was usually only six to ten minutes away from putting on Good At Falling by The Japanese House yet again. Or No Moon by Black Wing. Or Private Life by Tempers. To the exclusion of most other things this year, I was giving myself to the sounds of mourning and weariness, but ever anchored by a deathless and martial electronic rhythm. We are sad and we are moving.
As I’m writing this, I have the new Sunn O))) album rumbling in my headphones. I put it on because the drone helps me focus, but now it’s reminding me I had something close to a religious experience with them this year. They repressed their album Life Metal, which I excitedly mail ordered because I had been rattling my car stereo with it a lot and thought it would be a good record to have. When it arrived, I poured myself a glass of bourbon, put on my headphones and dropped the needle and settled on the couch next to my partner who was doing something else. I wish I could be more specific about that, but I really do not remember what was happening outside of my skull for the next hour. The experience of the music is like floating on your back on a great ocean — feeling a sense of the vastness around you and below you, lulled into peace by great expanses of sustain and feedback, before being plunged below the surface with a chest-thumping roar as Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley change chords. My partner told me I didn’t blink or move the entire time. And with good reason. I’m pretty sure I saw god.
The band HEALTH put out a song with Poppy recently, reminding me that they’d put out a song with Nine Inch Nails a little before that, and reminding me, hey, I should investigate that band HEALTH like I’ve been meaning to and now I have the cover of their album DEATH MAGIC sewn onto my jacket because I love it like I love a blissed-out stranger dancing next to me at a concert, losing themselves in the moment until we make eye contact and then briefly we are dancing together, our personal reveries conjoined for a moment as we take in the feeling of seeing and being seen in our joy. I really miss dancing with strangers at concerts.
I really love this album that came out in 2015. Every song has a moment where something unexpected happens, reminding you there are people behind the machines making these noises and this jarring drop or this blast of noise or this beautiful voice floating over everything is an attempt to connect with you. To shake you into recognizing you’re not alone here.
