- My favorite record of the year
I recently picked up Amanda Petrusich’s fascinating book on 78 RPM record collectors, Do Not Sell at Any Price, and, early on, paused on a passage about Facebook. After collector and preservationist Christopher King mentions Facebook postings as the kind of bits of everyday life that can easily vanish in the future, Petrusich posits the possibility that these digital scraps could last longer than we might imagine when we type them out: “Although King would have scoffed at the notion it’s possible to argue that our digital legacies (all those dopey Facebook posts) will ultimately prove infinitely more enduring than our material legacies. They are, after all, replicated and indissoluble—such is the way of the Web.”
The memory of Bernard’s death would occasionally surface when I repeatedly listened to my favorite album of the year, Home, Like Noplace Is There, from Massachusetts emo band the Hotelier. On the searing “Your Deep Rest” front man Christian Holden sings about a friend’s suicide, and his sobering lyrics detail the stomach-knotting anguish of seeing a friend’s body laid out in a coffin. Holden’s voice cracks into a piercing scream while he sings about his friend’s depression, and his performance sparks with a cathartic frisson as life-affirming as the forceful, anthemic guitars at his back.
I can’t provide a numerical score that neatly summarizes all my reactions to an album the same way that the people I saw writing on Bernard’s Facebook wall couldn’t possibly express all the deep, meaningful aspects of their friendships in a few words like “I miss you.” But if we don’t write something, and if I don’t assemble something, it’s harder to remember how I felt at this particular moment years down the line. With that in mind, here are a few lists of some of my favorite releases from the past year. My overall favorites include three Chicago rap releases and two albums that sound like they were made by TV on the Radio, although the Brooklyn band only made one of the records. These releases aren’t assembled in any particular order, but I’ve felt strongly about all of them. Jump in:
I also wrote about “the best things about Chicago music” for our Year in Review, which you can read here.
