Ten Albums

When I started this newsletter, I was staunchly opposed to the conventions of music criticism. I didn’t know what shape this would take, but I had a few ground rules, mostly about escaping the good album/bad album discourse of the music industry. There are good albums I hate and bad albums I love.

In light of this, I really considered not making a year-end list, that sacred culmination of every music writer’s murmuring. But I love these lists, and study them like holy texts. Hanif Abdurraqib’s this year is thorough, digestible, has some pretty incredible music. I admire what he’s done in crafting this. New Bands For Old Heads also has a brilliant take on the year-end list, one that I, admittedly, wish I thought of first.

By opting out, I figured, I would be abandoning so much memory, so many albums that helped me through the year. I decided to revisit ten albums from the year, some new, some old, that hold meaning for me. This was a year of change for me, and music kept me company.

Thanks for reading Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist. It means the world, and I hope you stick around for 2025. Now please enjoy ten albums I enjoyed very much this year:

Every Bad, Porridge Radio (2020)

I moved to a new city in August when the weather was still hot enough to make walking long distances uncomfortable. Sure, my legs stuck together, but they also stuck to the plastic bus seat and my fake-leather desk chair, so I might as well walk around. And while I’m walking around, I might as well listen to music. It’s remarkable how quickly I exhausted my desire for old albums. How quickly my music was insufficient. Somewhere in that collision between old and new, I found a curious desire for more music. An appetite, maybe.

It was around this time that I started my Substack because my Mom suggested I share my writing, but also because I wanted a tether to a third place: not home, not here, but some other broader community.

New Bands For Old Heads recommended this joint by Porridge Radio and I thought it was kinda weird at first, but then I found myself walking home from a new job, past the dog park-slash-rugby club, and the album went:

Thank you for making me happy

Thank you for making me happy

Thank you for making me happy

Thank you for making me happy

Thank you for making me happy

Thank you for making me happy

Thank you for making me happy1

And I began to go:

thankyouformakingmehappy

thank you for making me happy

Thank You For Making Me Happy

Until my voice startled some dogs playing fetch in the waning light, and I walked the rest of the way with an entire album to discover. Satisfied. Happy.

Porridge Radio released Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me this year. It’s fantastic. I listen to it every other week, but Every Bad was my album.

This City Isn’t Big Enough, Apes of the State (2016)

I bought the ticket before I moved to Vancouver, not bothering to check the venue details. A student newspaper described the venue as “strange, but necessary” in one of their reviews. Funny enough, those are the same words I would use to describe Apes of the State.

The stage was sandwiched between walls made of shipping containers. I could see the industrial East Side’s smokestacks, pasted against far-off mountains. Several table lamps sent a warm glow across the audience, most of us seated on the pavement, some nursing warm beers.

I bought the ticket because This City Isn’t Big Enough is a formative album for me, a sound I keep coming back to. There’s something so raw about it, so angry, so I went to see them live. I remember two things most clearly:

April Hartman started skanking when the first chords rang out. I mean her feet shot higher than her head and her hands cut viciously through the air. I mean I hardly thought anybody even skanked anymore, but here she was, clutching a microphone, leaping into a song I’ve grown to love. I mean April Hartman looked like she was home.

Apes of the State played their final song from the pit, unplugged, wading through the thin crowd. We circled around them and sang what they sang, drowned out the sound of their instruments. Our voices receded into the East Side night, and we sang louder still. Loud enough to be heard elsewhere. Loud enough to keep some of the audience upright. We sang and we sang and our concert floated out over the harbor like some sort of benediction. We sang the final song from This City Isn’t Big Enough, our chorus ringing:

This city isn’t big enough for any of us

So it’s on to the next one on to the next one

On to the next one on to the next one

On to the next one on to the next one.2

Tiger’s Blood, Waxahatchee (2024)

Jay texted me just as I was in the backseat of a car rolling past Chicago. He sent an album: Tiger’s Blood, by Waxahatchee. We had just finished a podcast and our ears needed someplace to rest. Enter Katie Crutchfield’s clearheaded brand of folk rock— at times warm, at times angry, at times just the right tone to soundtrack the highway unfurling beneath a receding sunset.

Just a day earlier, cresting a winding, blind corner hill somewhere in Vermont, my Dad asked “Hey, do you know Waxahatchee?”

I did, but in a distant sort of way. Like a track on a playlist I used to know, or a song I heard our college DJ play once. We had a couple more days of driving ahead of us, and we figured that Waxahatchee would make it on at some point. For those first few hours, though, leaving half my life behind, we kept the radio low. We talked about everything that had happened since Christmas. I dusted off all my little stories, listened fondly as my parents talked about home. There was no desire for music, just the slow chatter of our defrosting.

We stopped in Rochester and ate pizza on a patio that sprawled across the parking lot. A few tables away, five kids half-shouted, half-whispered stories. They wore different college sweatshirts, and their uneasy manner spoke the body language of catching up.

That pizza burned the roof of my mouth, and as we slept in a motel on the other side of Buffalo, I reached for the parts of myself left two states away.

By the time we passed Wall Drug and detoured to Needles, Tiger’s Blood had formed its grooves in my head. I resisted the urge to play it again, wanting somehow to preserve the songs. My parents used to climb in this corner of South Dakota, and they pointed out the constellations of bolts running up each impossible tower, talking about long runouts, stone as good as velcro.

We waded through heavy webs of memory and turned North, up the low, knobby foothills, sun taking half the world with it on our left.

Tiger’s Blood is a vast, American album. When we got home, four days after I said goodbye to a handful of friends on a porch that was mostly falling apart, it was the only thing that could stretch the distance between Calgary and New Hampshire.

In “Lone Star Lake,” Crutchfield sings:

I get caught up in my thoughts

For lack of a better cause

My life's been mapped out to a T

But I'm always a little lost3

The World I’m Searching For, Jersey (2023)

Jersey was playing a show in Montreal so I bought two tickets and planned to drive up with Luke. He was the one who introduced me, every few months, to a new DJ on the scene. He was the first person I knew talking about Fred Again. He showed me BUNT, Romy, Jigitz, any other half-dozen artists who make amazing tunes.

Luke had the car and I had two tickets and we were so excited for the show, but we couldn’t go in the end. Life kicked up dust and when it settled, I had sold one ticket to a friend of a friend. Luke and I weren’t going to see Jersey.

Instead, we played The World I’m Searching For over, and over, and over again. We had a big porch and a couple couches and when the weather was warm, which was often, we sat out there and listened to music and talked shit about the world. Mostly, we talked about nothing at all. Some favourite ski movie, or a story from our old apartment, and sometimes we yelled to the boys who lived across the street. We drank cheap beer and we danced and we all hoped the sun would never fall behind the snow-covered rooftops. Life was careless, more than we knew, and full of joy.

The World I’m Searching For isn’t technically an album; it’s an EP. The distinction is mostly a function of length and, I think, recording contracts, but it was plenty enough for us. It was a brief capsule of joy, like so many promises we made that spring. Sometimes, I’m learning, we don’t know exactly what kind of world we’re searching for, so we propose possibilities. We imagine what might be, and sometimes it turns out but sometimes it doesn’t. We never made it to Montreal, but that doesn’t matter. We had our porch, and a speaker turned out the window, and Jersey made a damn good EP.

Radiator, Sadurn (2022)

In my new life I walk to work three days a week.

In my new life I walk a block to the bus stop, or I walk eight to a different bus, and I stand in line with everyone else, and I fit my body into a gap, try to lean when the bus turns.

In my new life I spend a lot of time wandering the house, trying to wrap myself around the unfamiliar corners of loneliness.

In my new life I do all these activities with headphones on, and I listen to music as often as I can. I am eager and happy.

In my new life I find Sadurn’s Radiator, an album that unravels at roughly the same pace as my new life.

In my new life I meet and forget new people, constant as the clouds that linger over the North Shore. I stretch my personality in new and unfamiliar ways. I speak faster, slower, louder, quieter. I find myself using slightly different accents. I shrug in and out of identities like sweaters at the thrift.

In my new life I catch myself thinking about old girlfriends. I fall in and out of love with every other person. I imagine dozens of lifetimes played out across the vast, shiny rubble of the city.

In my new life I wait until it gets dark and walk around my block, picture myself buying a new luxury infill. The next morning I walk past our local community center and decide that my life is quite small after all, and that’s a beautiful thing. Sadurn’s album is a perfect companion for my new life. I buy my produce from an old Chinese woman who appreciates my sweaters. I drink beers in the park with Haruki and Justin after work. I make coffee every morning and sit in a new favourite chair. I swim in the ocean with John once a week. I don’t talk to my family as much as I should.

In my new life I go to a poetry night in a vintage shop on the third Wednesday of each month, and catch live music at the grad student bar every other Thursday, and try a new café every couple of weeks.

In my new life there are a lot of gaps and a lot of unfamiliar edges. I run my hands over everything, trip on the roots and stare too long at passerby. Craving something familiar, I melt into Radiator, which sounds like a comfortable home. It is a soothing, thoughtful album, something new to call my own. I try not to share it with many people, and when a ski movie soundtrack features “icepick,” I am both saddened and joyful. It is an old album, but it is new to me.

In my new life, things lean towards the familiar. Routines emerge like paths worn across a patch of grass. I know how long it takes me to walk places, how much space I have for how many songs. I know that each sunny day is a blessing, and I learn to love the rain. The final song off Radiator is titled “<---” and it rewinds me back to the beginning of the album.

In my new life I start again, try to get things right this time.

Dunya, Mustafa (2024)

When I moved away to college my Dad started sending me newspaper articles in the mail, like his dad used to do for him. I’d get an envelope with an article about chickadees and a few kind words from home. Just a hand on the shoulder, a nudge, a way to remind me of his being there.

My parents came to visit me this fall and left, among other things in a housewarming bag, an article about Mustafa’s Dunya. I had mentioned the album at some point, I think, and I may have written about it or posted it on instagram but, anyway, Mum read the article and though of me and saved it.

Dunya is a long awaited album, from when Mustafa went by Mustafa the Poet, when I first heard his carefully layered songs. It is an album built of grief, fragile sadness, and honesty.

My new roommate Izah is from Toronto and I consider maybe asking him about Mustafa but then I overthink it and say nothing until he posts “Name of God,” and I, too, love that song. We are briefly more connected than we were before. There isn’t much more to be said that Dunya doesn’t say for itself. It is a uniquely beautiful album.

In “Gaza is Calling” Mustafa writes:

Every time I say your name

There’s a war that’s in the way.4

After all that’s happened this year, all the countless flashpoints of rage and trappings of genocide, the relentless march of a media machine churning out pictures of bodies and rubble, here is a Gaza that has produced actual people. Here is a home, taken away. Here, grief is a global occurrence. From a shattered country to a brother lost in the maze of Toronto, Mustafa invites us to sit with him. To listen.

Dunya is an inescapable album. It followed me across the country in a newspaper article, in a roommate’s instagram story. I have nothing much else to say, only that this album deserves your careful attention.

Carrier Pigeon, Odie Leigh (2024)

I signed up to volunteer for the Calgary Folk Music Festival the day after I found out Odie Leigh was playing. If I’m being honest, I really only did it for the free festival pass. I hadn’t been to a folk fest in years, had never gone the full four days. My crew—main field security—wasn’t really about security at all. We rearranged blankets and tarps, chatted, and listened to all the various echoes of music. It was a pretty sweet gig. There were two other young people, both teachers, in their late twenties. One supervisor pointed to a nearby high-rise and explained that he’s a financial analyst the rest of the year. Doug, my shift partner, was retired and sold his house over the phone during our shift. It was a funny crew of people.

Sitting here in December, I can conjure up so many shows from weekend. I stumbled on Etran de L’Air playing a brilliant set of Nigerien rock. BCUC blew the doors off the main stage with South-African psych rock. Deer Tick barely made their set because the airline lost a bass guitar. I missed Ben Howard because I was trying to rent a place in Vancouver over the phone. The Roots were unstoppable for three hours. Leith Ross played maybe my favourite set of the weekend: gorgeous Winnipeg folk to a crowd of young people lined up at the barrier, singing every word.

I mean all this to say that, in a weekend of breathtaking performances, Odie Leigh was having a difficult weekend. During a workshop, she confessed that she didn’t feel like she belonged with all these legacy musicians, these people speaking the language of keys and chord progressions. She just wrote songs, and sang them, and shouldn’t that be enough?

Odie Leigh was having a difficult weekend by the time she took a filler spot next to the main stage on a hot Sunday afternoon. The thing about filler spots is that nobody really listens to them, which results in a unique invisibility, which means that Odie Leigh admitted she had a difficult weekend and that she cried on stage yesterday but, anyways, she has a new album out called Carrier Pigeon and we should listen to it. At the front of the small crowd gathered for Odie Leigh’s filler spot, there was a person wearing a homemade Odie Leigh shirt. I’d seen this person at all four shows, and they sang louder and longer than anyone I heard all weekend.

I read recently that this had been a year of quantity, and not quality in music. While I generally agree with that sentiment, I think that having an abundance of voices is never a bad thing. I think that I would never have been at folk fest if it wasn’t for Odie Leigh. If it wasn’t for Carrier Pigeon, I wouldn’t have seen another dozen bands. I mean we don’t need chords or key signatures or any institutional bullshit they throw at us to make music, to love music, to find ourselves settled comfortably in a grass field on a July afternoon, listening to strangers sing our favourite songs. It’s not that deep. It’s just a couple guitars and a beautiful voice.

Spiral in a Straight Line, Touché Amoré (2024)

The roaming fees for a twelve-hour trip were too high, so I took a screenshot of apple maps before crossing the border. It didn’t turn out to be necesssary, because there were two turns between Vancouver and Seattle: one off the freeway, and one onto 1^st Ave. Simple.

I stopped somewhere in Washington, bought gas and reheated thanksgiving leftovers on a camp stove. Called Emily to explain what I was doing, so that she would not be alarmed at my sudden appearance in Seattle. Just a quick trip, I explained, wolfing down my turkey, gravy, and white bread. Back in the car, on the freeway, right on Union St., right on 1^st Ave.

One hour later, I parked the car several blocks too far away and ran until I saw The Crocodile blinking green in the night. The sidewalk was full of people smoking and chatting, the venue loving the street. I asked the bouncer who scanned my ticket what I had missed. Three Bands, they said, but not Touché.

When the show started, the middle of the room was empty, bordered at the back by plenty of old heads sipping their drinks, content to watch the carnage. A dedicated faction clung to the barrier, inches away from Jeremy Bolm’s spitting face. Behind the two: a spin cycle. An immense absence in the middle of the room, home to one or two of us, briefly, for half a song each. I planted my feet and screamed at the ground, looked up to see someone skanking alone in the spotlight, head bent as if in prayer.

Skanking.

At some point in the ruckus my hat was torn from my head and sifted to the floor, where I spotted it for a half-second before it was swiped away by a foot and my fingers met emptiness when they reached for it. To have something so real, so remembered, just out of reach in a teeming pit of madness. To have travelled so far only to lose one more thing.

Oh, but the show. The show was amazing. The album is loud. It is necessary. It is angry and mournful and pitiful and jealous, all the things we never reach for but can’t seem to shake. It left me with a clear head and a generous sense that everything was going to be okay, at least for a little while.

Foxing, Foxing (2024)

This year I gained a new appreciation for loud music. I wrote about it. I started going to more punk shows, hardcore, even metal. I was probably a bit pretentious about the whole exercise, but it really meant something to me. I really felt, in my most ragged moments, that we were all trying to protect some tender and vulnerable truth. A small concession to the world.

There is a photo from a gig where I am barely visible in the background, wrecked, shirt sweat-soaked, off-kilter, holding my toque in my hand, eyes closed. Smiling.

The thing about these loud shows is that our bodies almost certainly can’t withstand the violence, so we grab at the smallest moments of relief: a breath of wafted air from a fan, a collective slumping against one another, a moment of silence as the guitarist tunes. In one such moment the music burned on, but I caught hands with my friend David, and we both stopped for a moment in the storm, before the gears churned on and my forgetting recommenced.

I tell you all this to help you understand how, in the breach of a long, dark fall, Foxing’s self-titled album came to me. The album is devastating in its quiet moments and overwhelming at its loudest. It drifts imperceptibly towards some melodic promise and leaves you breathless, winded just as quickly. It’s beautiful and heartwrenching. It’s an album that holds your forehead to some stubborn wall or another until you concede, then lays you down to rest.

It’s an album best described by an essay I read around this time last year, in which Hanif Abdurraqib writes that “an album’s opening song should be a loud and all-consuming stretch of madness.”5 I think of consumption now, of what it is to be consumed by a song, by a person, by a place. I think of madness. The opening song on Foxing is “Secret History,” and I have no better description for the song than all-consuming. Demanding. Exhausting.

This album swept me up in a torrential roar, scrubbed me raw, and left me quivering in the soft darkness, relishing the gentle spit of rain on my bare and bruised arms.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (2005)

There’s an enormous used book sale at the Calgary Curling Club every spring, right about the time I get home and the last islands of dirty snow are finally draining into the gutter. I went with my family and got a good stack of books. After time spent browsing a completely disheveled cd section, I added a New Pornographers album and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to my pile.

My cd collection went up from eight to ten whole discs!

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is an album I sort of remember from my big indie phase, though I was too late for the band’s real glory. I recall a couple youtube videos and playlists, a generally happy time in my life. I grabbed the album without much intention of playing it, having just donated my cd player when I moved in the spring. It so happened I was working a job last summer that, among other things, required several hours spent every week driving passenger vans without aux cords. We were confined to radio and, when we rolled out of reception, static, unless I remembered to bring a couple cds.

In this way, I spent my summer listening to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. By many standards, it is an old album, but it remains demanding and urgent. It is fun, unexpected, and mostly cheery. I realize now that so much of this list postures as something monumental, life changing. As if each of these albums have the power to change the world. They don’t, and I shouldn’t pretend otherwise, but they nonetheless occupied significant space in my life this past year. This album, though, is a fun album. It reminds me of being sixteen again, armed with a new driver’s license, staring into a vivid and imagined future. It found me again in July, rolling down a highway at the foot of towering peaks, white speck in a vast landscape of lodgepole pine green. It made me smile, as the days stretched longer, longer, and I worked a summer job for what might be the last time, and the world was a hopeful place.

I’ll leave you with this: the promise of hope. There will be hundreds of new albums this year, thousands of new songs. There will be unfamiliar joys and unwelcome sadness. There will be love, grief, awe, beauty, anger, violence, wonder, and abundance. There will be so much more, and in this onslaught I will find myself marooned on certain albums. Some will be old, and some will be new, and I look forward to them all.