THE REVIEW OF 2019
50 SHANA CLEVELAND
Night Of The Worm Moon HARDLY ART
Its title inspired by Sun Ra’s The Night Of The Purple Moon, the second solo LP from the La Luz singer and guitarist moulded the interstellar jazz auteur’s cosmic bent to her own fingerpicked acoustic guitar. As wonky chord sequences echoed Syd Barrett’s solo work, and pedal steel and synths provided an eerie, psychedelic air, Cleveland sang of grief, dreams and nameless terrors in the Californian darkness.
49 STEPHEN MALKMUS
Groove Denied DOMINO
While last year’s Sparkle Hard was Malkmus’s most accessible effort to date, here the songwriter explored his more outré interests with this basement electronic album. Despite a troubled gestation, Groove Denied turned out to be a laidback triumph: its laptop production was hazily vintage, reminiscent of early Cabaret Voltaire and Human League, while its inspired tracklisting gradually took the listener from machine-tooled abstraction to more traditional, guitar-based songs.
48 LIZZO
Cuz I Love You NICE LIFE/ATLANTIC
2019 found Minneapolis-based singer/rapper Melissa Viviane Jefferson propelling her whipsmart rhymes, body-positive message and occasional flute solos into the mainstream, with third album Cuz I Love You reaching the Billboard Top 5. A savvy, boisterous antidote to moody rap nihilism, the album placed Lizzo firmly in the lineage of Outkast and Missy Elliott, with the latter turning up to anoint her successor on the irresistible “Tempo”.
47 NÉRIJA
Blume DOMINO
The debut album by this Domino-signed ‘supergroup’ exemplified why the new wave of British jazz has been such a breath of fresh air. Despite featuring a number of the scene’s major players – saxophonists Nubya Garcia and Cassie Kinoshi, trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey, trombonist Rosie Turton and more – it never felt like anyone was queuing up for a solo, instead striving to fashion a supremely harmonious blend of ’70s astral jazz and contemporary global flavours.
46 LAMBCHOP
This (is what I wanted to tell you) CITY SLANG
Under Kurt Wagner’s tutelage, Lambchop are an object lesson in how a band can evolve gracefully. The work begun on 2016’s FLOTUS – exploring the possibilities of electronica – was sustained on the immersive, thought-provoking This (is what I wanted to tell you), which navigated a path through the organic and the electronically adjusted, aided by sometime Bon Iver drummer Matt McCaughan, Calexico trumpeter Jacob Valenzuela and Nashville veteran Charlie McCoy.
45 SLEAFORD MODS
Eton Alive EXTREME EATING
“It’s getting shitter!”
