Indie Rock Saves Man's Little Life

2024: A Year in Review

Dec 18, 2024

2024 was a great year for music. Jury’s out on if it was a good year for me (Jon). To be honest with you, reader, it has been a hard year for me. I have gone through some jarring changes & feel more lonely and unsure of myself than I ever have. As always, music is the crutch that has gotten me across. But let’s not be maudlin- some good things happened for me too! I quit my stupid day job and started a Masters program in urban planning. I saw Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson live. I got my first ever car. I even started a blog about music on a website called “substack”! I won’t post the link here though— because I’m sooo shy 😣👉👈😓 (also, you’re already reading it). The good, the bad, we must take it all. To quote Oakland rapper Fredobagz, I’m not dead. So let’s get into it.

First, Some Music NOT from 2024

Ray Charles- Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Vols. 1 & 2

There are two ways into this one. The first way is a 2024 Beyonce record ostensibly functioning to open up the Black roots of “country music.” I was excited for Cowboy Carter in its concept; its execution left me disappointed and frustrated. As a country music booster I am always trying to hype up the multicultural avalanche that birthed the genre. If at least part of Beyonce’s mission is pedagogical– the great pop musician of this century also cosplays as a history teacher– Cowboy Carter is an ineffective lecture. If you wanted to sketch out a history of some of the most notable Black country artists, you might mention Charley Pride or Linda Martell (who appears on Beyonce’s album kind of? You wouldn’t know she put out a record in 1970 that rocks.) And then, ladies and gentlemen, there is Ray Charles.

The second way to Ray is in a bar somewhere in Los Angeles. I’m trying to get drunk. I’m trying to feel normal and failing miserably. The jukebox is impoverished but I scroll through. I’ve got no dough– not the paper kind I need, and by the time I finagle some from the bartender another guy is locked in, playing the left and right buttons like a blind pianist or something. He tells me he just queued 15 songs (15??) so I give up and just take a seat. Then, it feels like the wind gets sucked out of my chest. The most arresting string section bursts open, then melts away into a slow walking bassline and some delicate hi-hats. This is Ray Charles’ rendition of “Worried Mind.” It’s stunning.

The whole album is full of these breathtaking country covers fed into and spit out of the Ray Charles pop machine. Ironically, Modern Sounds… was Charles’ attempt to desegregate country music, while “Worried Mind” co-writer Jimmie Davis became a segregationist Louisiana governor in the 1940s (and again in the 60s???). Listen, at the end of the day it is better to have been a segregationist who wrote “You Are my Sunshine” than a segregationist who didn’t. Right? It’s all light work for Ray, who has such authority on these songs it’s easy to listen and forget about life for a little while.

RIP Steve Albini

In his review of Cheap Trick’s 1977 In Color, Robert Christgau wrote “If only they seemed interested in their well-crafted say-nothing lyrics.” I’ve always felt like Cheap Trick were cool and slick, but there was never a depth that brought me back. Steve Albini, who passed away on May 7th of this year, re-recorded the album with Cheap Trick in 1997, 20 years after its initial release. And in this version, boy are they interested in their lyrics. Pretty much every Youtube comment on the video for Albini’s session is instantly evangelized.

Albini x Cheap Trick is a critical Illinoisian link-up. What’s cool about this re-record is it completely rewired my concept of this band. While I liked their big hits, something was missing. They were a little too good– too much sheen, too frivolous. But this album is so loud and hairy in a way that their mainstream record never sounded. The genesis of re-recording In Color 20 years later is, according to this quote I found on a rock forum, that the band thought the first producer ruined the record. So says guitarist Bun E. Carlos: “He made it safe for radio, but the album sounds like it was done in a cardboard box.”

This is a whole new band here and they are out of the cardboard box. Just listen to the Albini cut of “I Want You to Want Me.” On his take, the instruments blend together, whereas on the ‘77 recording the magic is missing. You can hear how the sausage is made, the instruments are disconnected and solitary. The juice isn’t there! My favorite song is “Southern Girls” and I’m convinced the Albini version could have become a massive hit. Robin Zander is doing some AC/DC cosplay at the beginning like a little devil.

—A few other Albini recordings I got into postmortem:

-The original singles from In Utero are sooooo cool

-So are the British Nirvana swagjackers Bush

-Mclusky is new to me. Song rips.

-The story of him recording Jason Molina’s Farewell Transmission is amazing. If you haven’t listened to Jason Molina I’d suggest it- one of the great Midwestern songwriters. A personal favorite

Destroyer

For most people my age, the introduction to Dan Bejar’s Destroyer project was 2011’s Kaputt, an album that drifts on a beguilling melancholy humor. I still laugh at the chorus from “Poor in Love”: I was poor in love, I was poor in wealth, I was okay in everything else there was. Why is it so hard for musicians to be funny? 2024 was the year I got into Bejar’s 2001 masterpiece Streethawk: A Seduction. Enigmatic, hilarious, magnetically melodic and full of strange, knife-sharp wisdom…has anyone ever made a better album? Maybe I’d call this album postmodern classic rock if some academic had a gun to my head. Loud, powerful guitar and ironic aphorisms do not have to be mutually exclusive. At its heart this album is about the vitality of art- of not being afraid to be truly yourself and to not bullshit yourself. Find something difficult to do and do it right! Bejar sings on “English Music.” Is there a more succinct thesis for living? Like all great art, Streethawk makes me yearn for something intangible. It wells up in me the desire to be a part of the world.

Favorite Albums from 2024

LIQUID MIKE: PAUL BUNYAN’S SLINGSHOT

There’s some cliche that “music finds you.” Or maybe I made that up right now. It feels like something people might say. Anyway, I think I’m saying it now. In January I went by myself to a local rock show at a record store in a gentrifying east Los Angeles neighborhood. I wanted to see this band Diners. There were 5 bands on the bill and I made the terrible mistake of getting there too early. Sometimes you go do something alone and it rocks. You meet new people, feel energized. Standing on the patio between sets, feeling the impossibility of connection to the other patio-hangers, it occurred to me that this time was a different kind, the one where you feel insecure and very far away. So I drove home and sat in the car outside my apartment desperately scrolling twitter for anything that might make me feel normal. Cue the harmonica from “American Caveman.” It was a bolt from the blue!

Mike was my first interview for this blog. It’s cool how I feel as strongly about this album as when I first heard it at the beginning of the calendar year. The whole record is phenomenal, as are the two deluxe tracks that came out about 8 months later. As is their 2023 album. And the 2022 one. Perfect power pop– emphasis on power– about getting older and being stuck in the Rust Belt. It was my soundtrack at the gym for those few months in the spring when I got swole as hell (source?).

JLIN: AKOMA

Jlin is Jerrilynn Patton, the Gary, IN-born electronic composer. I’ve been a fan for a while but when I learned that she was working with some The Hours soundtrack-era Philip Glass, I freaked out. This is a combination made in a lab specifically for me. It speaks to the high watermark Jlin is constantly striving for and achieving. Her work has sought something beyond footwork, though it still retains that frenetic energy. This is something else, combining the snare runs and beeps with a classical sense of grandeur and poise. It feels like the kind of music you could plot out to resemble the Fibonacci Sequence or some perfect mathematical equation. Her percussive palette is unmatched. One of the most exciting releases of the year.

THIS IS LORELAI: BOX FOR BUDDY, BOX FOR STAR

There’s a competition in indie rock for Top Guy in Buzzy Band Who Also Has a Buzzy Solo Project. And the editorial staff here supports Nate Amos over MJ Lendermann. Listen, I got really into this guy. He was kind of my emotional support rock band. We aren’t going to do better than “I’m All F****d Up” and “An Extra Beat For You and Me” this year. Wrap it up fellas.

This is Lorelai is a good reminder that life is messy and that that’s OK. Box… shares an emotional mercuriality with The Magnetic Fields. Or if Jeff Tweedy sometimes used obnoxious drum machines. My heart’s so full of pain that I could fly, he sings on “Two Legs.” The title track is a twangy “Sloop John B” redux. I think this is one of the best albums of the year- it’s courageous and idiosyncratic and messy and so re-listenable. I think in 2029 this will be one of the best albums of the decade.

I also feel I should give a shoutout to Amos' other project, Water From Your Eyes, which he collaborates on with former Whitney Young’er Rachel Brown. Shoutout to Whitney Young kids.

RAFAEL TORAL: SPECTRAL EVOLUTION

The horror story goes like this: time is incomprehensible. It has gone on forever and will go on forever. Nature is brutally efficient. Plants choke each other out for sunlight. Wolves get fat off old elk leaving streaks of blood on the snow. Birds sing into a flowery abyss of death and life and death. Toral’s Spectral Evolution feels like the recorded equivalent. An unsettling chorus of electronic birdsong coalesces, falls apart, finds frequency and dissonance. Behind it, sweeping synths signal the end is near and that new life is coming. I find myself moving between two poles while listening: the world is alien and uncaring. I will disappear one day and become plant food. And: the world is constantly cannibalizing itself and one day, thousands of years from now, I’ll be back. It is inevitable that we die. It is inevitable that life will keep waking up, even if the birds sing to no one.

It’s worth reading the Pitchfork review of Spectral Evolution to get some context on the experimental design of the album. Rafael Toral seems like a very cool guy.

CINDY LEE: DIAMOND JUBLIEE

32 songs. Spurning streaming for Youtube and a Geocities site. Cindy Lee was the indie rock story of the year for people old enough to remember being online in 2008. I think Cindy Lee (the drag queen alter-ego of Women guitarist Pat Flegel) was such a critical hit exactly because she shouldn’t have been & didn’t want to be. Hilariously inaccessible to find but once you plug in, it’s incredible: smoky girl group jams and reverb’d 60s guitar pop that feels like you turned on a radio from a parallel universe.

I was able to see Cindy Lee perform before she cancelled her tour. Specifically, I saw her in San Diego on the now-lore tour stop where she proclaimed to us that she “felt like a caged fucking animal.” This could have been related the venue, which was spatially carceral, or the fact that an album released on Geocities had gotten a Pitchfork BNM (and is their #1 album of the year) and Lee was the new hottest act in the indie world. At the show she had a guitar without a strap, holding it delicately with two hands before sitting down to innocuously hammer out an incredible riff or solo. Just true guitar hero shit.

Cindy Lee (like many others) is over my bullshit

There are a lot of great songs on this album, and you could make the argument that its power kind of goes beyond any one song. But I did want to highlight the first (and title) song, which rocked my shit, and still does. “Diamond Jubilee” is easily one of the best songs of the year. It reminds me of that scene in Darjeeling Limited when they finally meet the mom at that convent in the mountains and they sit in a circle and she says “maybe we can express ourselves more fully if we don’t say it in words” and then “Play with Fire” drops. There is something ancient and elemental in “Diamond Jubilee.” I can feel time when I listen. It’s got such incredible momentum. I just know I’m going to be OK when I listen?

CLAIRE ROUSAY: SENTIMENT

claire rousay is an experimental musician who has been making found-sound collages- Sentiment is the closest thing she’s done to a proper indie rock release. It is a heartwrenching, emo-ambient exploration of the burned-out shell of love lost. rousay has been touring this album with a really cool live set-up, recreating her bedroom on stage. The intimacy of Sentiment matches this stage design, which is often too painful to bear. This is the most I’ve ever felt / alone she admits on “Lover’s Spit Plays in the Background.”

I was lucky enough to see rousay live this year, on a fantastic split bill with Young Jesus. It was rapturous- I held onto her every word and felt my world falling apart alongside hers. It is usually too difficult for me to listen to Sentiment- I really have trouble listening to rousay’s vulnerability and being able to then have a normal day. But the days haven’t been normal!

Other Albums I Liked (alphabetical with one song attached I think you (yes- you) will like)

Allegra Krieger- Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine

Sounds like: Adrienne Lenker with less blah blah blah

Charley Crockett- Visions of Dallas

Sounds like: Merle Haggard with a better voice(??)

Itasca- Imitation of War

Sounds like: Joni Mitchell with guitar chorus effect on 10

Macseal- Permanent Repeat

Sounds like: Scrubs soundtrack

Mdou Moctar- Funeral for Justice

Sounds like: Facemelting Tuareg rock

Kelly Moran- Moves in the Field