Top Albums 2019 Part III 30 – 21

30. Caroline Polachek – PANG

Polachek's first album under her full name and without the guise of another project or approach shares parallels with Charli XCX self-titled Charli released this year. This doesn´t only apply for both artists choosing the futuristic PC Music production team to exponentially grow the instrumental side of their music but in their attempt of going for the heart of pop experienced in their own voices. Polachek released two more experimental or left-leaning albums, notable her first 2014 album Arcadia as Ramona Lisa, trying to put her voice in all its effortless baroque abilities to the front and ultimately bordering from airy to incredibly vapid art-pop. On PANG the best elements of her vocal abilities grow together with her sensibility for sweet pop about love and heartbreak, elements that made the best Chairlift tracks lustrous or would come to the forefront when lending her voice to artists like Blood Orange. Opposite to Charli, PANG is an astounding collection of songs that flow into one, even when Polachek taps into the more neon-colored repertoire of PC Music. No song is filler, even "New Normal" or "Caroline Shut Up", which feel radio-ready in the weakest sense of the word remain likable on the project and don´t go for the trade of a mass-appealing idea or sound drowning out the songwriting or the message for a snarky insta-ready statement about love that can be broken down to a caption or "mood". Overall this makes for the best pop record of 2019, one that doesn´t shine away from nostalgia as it does from craft and artistry.

29. Daniel Lopatin – Uncut Gems

I haven´t seen the new movie by the Safdie Brothers yet and like last time, the soundtracks hit before the visuals do. The directors of 2017´s Good Time have once again chosen to work with Daniel Lopatin better known as Oneohtrix Point Never and this hopefully will lead to an ongoing musical relationship of soundtracking their powerfully sharp echoes of crime and hustling in New York. That being said, it makes sense that Oneohtrix used his own name for this release. There is still a lot of the signature sound you´ve come to expect from Lopatin´s work, but here the cold synthesis of his recent work or Good Time has mellowed in favor of a sprawling display of how vaporwave can become cinematic – how the sounds of strange decay, the empty design of an opaque future and internet turn at once real and fit pure make-belief suited for an action-adventure movie. Oneo always had these sonic tendencies, for example in brief moments of "Americans" of his masterpiece R Plus Seven, but here the interlude-like qualities grow into fleshed out suites of imagination, a kind of wonderland. This might be hard to imagine for a presumably violent climax and gritty feel of a talkative jewel broker hustling his way from a gamble to gamble, but this dissonance can tie the look, sound and feel of a movie together. Simply by taking the longest three tracks, the beginning, middle and end of the album Uncut Gems, "The Ballad of Howie Bling", "School Play" and "Uncut Gems", you get space jazz impressionism, a frantic deluge of synth suspense thrown in your face and Alice in Wonderland within approximately 20 minute of music. However the movie and the usage within end up, Daniel Lopatin unifies these tracks and feelings in his beautiful mind, makes music that will never know boundaries of feel like tone is a restriction, rather a universe of dots to be connected.

28. Uniform & the body – Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back 

The second collaboration between Uniform and the body has both artists stretching their non-existent limits and go from their usual abrasive texture of shouts and scream to straight-up synth-pop if synth-pop was made from bleeding machines and sentiments of sadism. While the body are known for collaborating with bands that have a known reputation for pushing the sounds of extreme music, most of their collabs really recall monuments of friendship with their opposite artists. The voices of Berdan and Chip King complement each other perfectly, Berdan's angry yell and the disillusionment of King´s signature, tow-nail crawling wailing. The biggest surprises await in the moments the bands mingle their mindsets for catchy melodies ("Vacancy" and "Patron Saint of Regret" with SRSQ in particular). Here their work becomes truly collaborative as you actually feel that both bands don´t only support each other's musical ideas but live for exploring different approaches to their music. the body have mashed these styles on their previous albums and even got Full of Hell to jump on the reggeaton train, but here the reverence for synthesizer music and weird reference to Bruce Springsteen or movies glow in their own right.

27. Geins't Naït – Archives 1-3

Released under Low Jack´s own Editions Gravats label, Archives 1-3 compiles the first entry of work by the french electronic duo Geins't Nait. This is music from the year 1986 onwards, by two architecture students that made music in a time that didn´t give too much about genre or the internet as a place of discussion and communion on which sounds to attribute to which movement. The description of Surrealist and Situationist movements and Art Brut serve as the better-suited qualifiers for the duo's approach of industrial-tinged electronic music that uses hollow drum beats and a whole lot of noise and scum to full effect. You have the sample of angsty opera singing on "Cameo", scat impressionistic shouts and vocal noises on the next track "Quivala" or different kinds of voices, whispers, slight singing or spoken word on the following tracks. "Rossi Aldo" feels like it doesn´t know if it wants to be a song or a vocal-led beat, "Computer Bit" feels like messing around for the sake of turning up the levels of artifice. All this while keeping a steady pace of cavernous drumming or hollowed-out ideas of dance tracks and movement pieces close to techno. The drum machine is something Geins't Nait seems to love as well as try to bury and make irrelevant as such, while other artists were trying to figure out how to make these sounds work for entertainment, the duo seemed set on breaking their gear and the enjoyment of their listeners as well. This makes Archives 1-3 an incredible sight to behold on the turn of the next century and serves as the assurance that our contemporary spheres of music are yet to unpack and rightly process what past artists seemed to be doing on the fly.

26. Maria W. Horn – Epistasis

There is a lot of theoretical and technological intricacies to be unpacked in the four tracks of Maria W. Horn´s second album Epistasis. Using technological approaches to synthesis and structure her "Interlocked Cycles Pt. 1 & Pt.2", deconstructing and rehashing the tonality of early black metal on "Epistasis" and channeling Arvo Pärt´s musical theory in "Konvektion", Maria W. Horn marries craft and compositional strength with a depth of field that is becoming emblematic of the moderns composers and artists surround recent organ and classical work by XKatedral members. From a standpoint that is barely able to grasp the finer implications of musical theories or can even read musical scores, I am and more fascinated and indebted to listening and sensing as a bodily experience, Epistasis is yet another showcase of how music in a "traditional" mode, can be superformed to entail not only electronics as an element, but use electronics, assemblage, and different musical cultures to create some of the most intriguing musical moments of this year.

25. Alessandro Cortini – Volume Massimo

Alessandro Cortini, after showing the untapped potential of going minimalist and exercising the sound of a few modular synthesizers for Sonne and Riveglio, went the scenic route of filling his sound with his own autobiography on Avanti. Volume Massimo confirms the notion that Cortini lives to do pop music, even if this means filtering it through his own sense of style and making sounds pop. Here his usual bumps and peeks of synth-rises become more flexible, they leave his mind space and the tactful progression of exploding at the top for song structures, a tender respite of repetition and solution. Still tracks like "Amaro Amore" connect to his previous work as the continuation of the core ideas of his solo work, showcasing the grandeur synths can reach, their way of bathing your listening experience, cradling your ears in the warmth of electro-acoustics. "Batticoure" caresses meditation, Cortini extending the walk through memories of his Avanti project and like "Momenti" reconcile the explorative mode of synthesizer music with simple songs that could be synth-pop about being in love. Volume Massimo is a great passage of Cortini sustaining his tone and wide-eyed perspective on sound while making it accessible and easier to experience as a whole.

24. Charly Bliss – Young Enough

Charly Bliss made a huge leap from Guppy to Young Enough even if these minor tweaks might only become apparent a few listens in following the feeling of alienation from their known buoyancy. Young Enough deals with the fear of growing up and the ugly sides of being an active social being in their early twenties, it can be uncanny how much Eva Hendricks must have lived through at her age. Soundwise the band turned to synths and sometimes darker tones to fortify their power pop and songs about the confusions of love, abuse, and relationships. At times there is a Weezer influence, most notably at "Capacity" feeling like a cut of the Green Album. But apart from this similarity, the band's musicianship is growing and set on not reliving the same emotions lyrically as well as sonically. Tracks like "Capacity" or "Hart To Believe" still connect to thriving female-fronted pop-rock music, but do so in a fleshed-out manner, trading in the now minimalism of their first record for baroque ornaments and tight performances, even from the background vocals. The centerpieces of the project are all loaded in the back, the struggle of loving yourself and overcoming sexual assault in "Chatroom" sounds as colorful as a song on this topic could and is a powerful testament of pop music as a healing force for Hendricks and the listener herself. Another great departure from the usual persona is "Hurt" for toning down the power for the slow burn of a simple melancholic song, that surprisingly, was completely missing in Charly Bliss´s discography up until now. Young Enough is the greatest confirmation of a pop-rock band growing up and showing longevity other bands never reach in staying true to trusted formulas and emotions that never elevate from their first iteration.

23. Lingua Ignota – Caligula

For her first full-fledged Profound Lore debut, Kristin Hayter graces the label and this year with the ugliest and meanest album yet. While artists like Hunt-Hendrix and Liturgy tried their hand on operatic violence in black metal, Caligula is a true masterpiece of hate and disgust polished into a musical gem that defies expectation and any arrogance genre purist might have. Taking the persona of Caligula to heart, letting abuse and sexual violence against women turn into sour hatred and revenge porn against the perpetrators themself, Lingua Ignota unleashes sinister beasts with every track. The simple but powerful lyrics transmute under Hayter´s impeccable command of her voice. Lines like "But Bitch I Smell You Bleeding" become her poetics of violence and grace. The ideas of revenge have lived within the project since Hayter´s first album, yet here, for the first time, they disconnect from hurt and expand into actual malevolence. The quality of letting orchestral arrangements take the front before electronics or pure noise do, helps Caligula differentiate from power electronic wailings or more ambient contemplation. Hayter´s screams hover above even the thickest white noise, when the tracks feign melodramatic heights like on "SPITE ALONE HOLDS ME ALOFT", the intensity of her voice or guest vocals by Dylan Walker always make sure to ram the knife deep into your relaxing muscles, let you bleed under pain for buying into the lie of redemption. Caligula might be the best album to introduce others to extreme music, make a statement about sexual abuse and violence as a point of release and strength as well as a major point of understanding how metal music can grow and incorporate non-metal and non-electronic elements without becoming symphonic in the weaker sense of the genre-benders and boring bands using strings to make up for a lack of depth and thematic strength.

22. Abul Mogard – Kimberlin OST

It was only a matter of time before Abul Mogard would be enlisted for remixes and inevitably soundtracking the sensory reflexions of visuals on film – both marking his output in 2019. Kimberlin is the soundtrack to Duncan Whitley movie of the same name, a floating piece filmed on the Isle of Portland, obsessed with landscape and a tantalizing sense of loss give the political climate after half of the UK thought it best to secede from visons of globalism in favor of delusions of trade and national purity. Mogard´s music always carried a unique sense of place or rather thinking the real and sensing your environment within the soundscapes created by field recordings, synths, and Farfisa organ. Here you can imagine wandering the rocky green island of Portland, musing on what makes a country and democracies work, and how the need for identity against the other perpetuates actions against discourse and humanity. We are the ghost, listening to Kimberlin and the great endpoint of  "Playing on The Stones" while coming to terms with a world that is very much our own, Mogard helping us through his creation to dig deeper, whatever horrors and whichever desolation we may find.

21. Liturgy – H.A.Q.Q.

Trying to follow the theoretical superstructure of Liturgy and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix philosophy of transcendental black metal and "System of Transcendental Qabala", which Hendrix chose as the cover for H.A.Q.Q. in a tabular breakdown of sorts, might be incredibly rewarding and tedious at the same time, It´s like trying to figure out the Metal Gear timeline and wondering about how each piece recalls and predates the next in a narrative function and gameplay variance. Apart from all that, when "HAJJ" blooms to feature a hichiriki and ryuteki, instruments that were prominently used by Tim Hecker on his gagaku inspired run of Konoyo and Anoyo, you feel the result of Hunt-Hendrix taking up the task of bring a genre from light to dark and playing with all instances and tropes that made black metal the force of abrasive music. You hear a band and a theoretical thinker going above and beyond ideas of metal music, incorporating harp and orchestra to make their burst beats slap even harder whilst leaving space for innovation to happen. Those inclined to hate Liturgy and their admittedly made up struggle to change US black metal from its origins might find their first instance of liking H.A.Q.Q. for its sheer sense of identity as an album, using elements that have been present in Liturgy past work but turning them inwards for the own quantum mechanics of tracks and overall feel of the project. Even when the band goes for the harpsichord/piano tracks of "Exaco I-III", these operatic moments intercepted by slightest hits of electronic and distortion give H.A.Q.Q. more weight then another long-form track of eerie interactions of burst beats could have done. By all means that Hunter-Hendrix employs in his work external to his music, meant to attach and lead back to his sonic endeavors, the greatest gift of H.A.Q.Q. is the first time the disregard for the genre is made audible and visceral without being a crutch and ironic twist. The Ark Work attempted this with its stark alienation and abandonment, on H.A.Q.Q. the pieces fit and you need no further explanation.